


Horatio's Comprehensive Guide to the Supernatural

by ghostieboyo



Category: Hamlet - All Media Types, Hamlet - Shakespeare, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead - Stoppard
Genre: Ghosts, M/M, Modern Era, Post-Canon, emetophobia warning for some parts, for clarification as its kind of subtle: hamlet and horatio are both trans, main pairing is tragic danish bfs but everyone is umm....kind of gay...you will see, this is sure something! basically: supernatural creatures exist, whatever youre expecting youre probably wrong. i went full dumbass. just stupid and crazy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-10
Updated: 2019-07-15
Packaged: 2019-09-15 10:27:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 29,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16931556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghostieboyo/pseuds/ghostieboyo
Summary: He fully expects the entire room to be void of any evidence of the people once living in it, in favor of empty air and slightly sun-bleached curtains. But things don’t always turn out how he wants them to.“Horatio!”Horatio screams and slams the door.





	1. Entertainment Rooms and the Creature in the River

**Author's Note:**

> the working title for this was "spirits, royalty, and the poor fool that has to deal with them all" but it was just a bit too long and not catchy enough
> 
> im not kidding theres SO many ros and guil r dead refs

Horatio just doesn’t revisit the room he died in.

It’s a little inconvenient, assisting Fortinbras, having to run through the castle to fetch others and then push them along on a ridiculous detour filled with awkward small talk and calculated paces. The guards look at him strangely every time he leaves or enters the place. Marcellus waves.

He remembers a time when he hated the idea of being around rich people this long, and yet. Well. It’s sort of a consequence of the company he chose, isn’t it?

Said rich people don’t seem to want to enter the room, either. Bodies were dragged away and the few drops of blood from four bloodless murders were furiously scrubbed clean. It’s a beautiful entertainment room, large but not too large, enough room for a swordfight, a small audience, and a thin layer of dust on the floor. The doors are kept closed, and nobody asks why the cleaners don’t regularly visit it anymore. Everyone seems to avoid it, including Horatio.

Which is why he’s so confused as to why his hand is on the doorknob right now.

Maybe it’s a form of self-harming, or maybe a healthy confrontation of fear—who knows? All he knows is that he woke up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night with the echo of something that sounded suspiciously like Hamlet’s voice calling to him: _Horatio, come here_. Maybe he’d been pushing himself to write the manuscript for Hamlet’s story too much, but something about it made his spine shiver, so he was up and reaching for his glasses and the light of his phone within seconds.

He fully expects the entire room to be void of any evidence of the people once living in it, in favor of empty air and slightly sun-bleached curtains. But things don’t always turn out how he wants them to.

“Horatio!”

Horatio screams and slams the door.

He remembers the time: early morning.

“...My lord?” Horatio whispers, cracking open the door a bit.

“How many times have I told you to call me Hamlet?”

 

It wasn’t as if Horatio hadn’t seen a ghost before. Hell, it wasn’t even as if Horatio hadn’t seen a ghost named Hamlet before, but, as he tiptoes into the room and gingerly pulls the door closed behind him, out of the array of questions he has one seems to push to the forefront of his mind:

“Why? Why are you still here? What purpose do you have here? What do you need fulfilled that Fortinbras and I aren’t accomplishing?”

“You aren’t happy to see me?”

Horatio wants to throw up, so, instead, he starts pacing part of the room. Left brain mode. Come on. “List of possible explanations. One: I’m willing it. I’m going insane and I’ve been so desperate to see you again that I created a vision of you to appear only to myself, and if I try to tell anyone else about it they’ll rush me to a doctor—”

“Horatio.”

“Two: Nothing’s real anymore, we’re all in a simulation, and this whole palace is in a time loop Rocky-Horror-Picture-Show-Style but without all the fun parts and I’m stuck reliving the worst day of my life.” Horatio realizes he’d begun picking his fingernails and clasps his hands together instead. “On the whole, very unlikely.”

“Horatio, stop.”

“Three: This is the result of a power past my, or, for that matter, your, control. That is to say, you truly are hopelessly wandering the realm of the living at the witching hour without any say in it, your soul trapped for a reason beyond any simple understanding because you’re so emotionally constipated even in death and I, the sidekick, naturally have to barge into the room and cry over your dead body for the second time in less than a mo—”

“Horatio, stop!”

Hamlet’s voice shook the air, and Horatio felt the floor vibrate under his bare feet.

“Can we settle on the fact that there really are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy?”

The decidedly not-dead one of the two took a deep breath in, out. In, out. Just like the sweater-vest-wearing doctor Fortinbras made him visit that one time told him to. “I am happy, my lord, getting to see you again, but also not in knowing you have some purpose unfulfilled. I was comforted, thinking you could rest.” Horatio feels himself shaking. Maybe he’d been right from the start instead, and the ghosts of the Hamlets are both demons, but if there’s a chance Hamlet had died with something left undone… “I don’t know if you’re real just yet—if this is my mind fucking with me or something. I wanted you to come back but I didn’t want it to be like this. I don’t know what could possibly be keeping you here. You don’t feel anything? Some emotional force, pulling you to enlist the help of the living to complete a task?”

“I can’t imagine what that would be. My father is revenged.”

“Don’t remind me.”

“Sorry. I’m sorry.” He reached out to grab Horatio’s shoulder and only caused a cold shiver. “The only pull I have to do anything right now is to touch you…. Believe me, I don’t know why I’m here either. I’ve been waiting for you to come along. Hoping you could help with that.”

“How so?”

“Investigate.”

“All due respect, your directions are pretty vague.”

“As in…” Hamlet stares across the room, thinking for a moment, “I’m giving you permission to do anything. Rifle through my things. Ask anyone anything about me. Ask me, and I’ll tell you anything, if it helps.”

“I don’t like to imagine there’s a whole world about you I never figured out.” Horatio sits criss-cross-applesauce on the cold floor and leans his head against the door, eyes closed.

Hamlet laughs. “Well, there’s some things, but you know most of it. You always knew most of it.”

“I’m still writing your story, right?”

“If you’re still willing to.”

“Of course.” He opens his eyes. “Just mentally reorganizing my schedule to make time for a new priority.”

“That’s the Horatio I know. Logical, practical.” Horatio almost snorts at how ill-fitting those words have recently become but Hamlet just smiles, still convinced, making a once-comforting sight just become sort of sad on a translucent form. “In the meantime, I’d quite like your company.”

“You have it.” Horatio assured him. “You have it.”

 

\---

 

Horatio has a deal worked out with himself: he’d push and push and push until he was finished. Which, granted, is a fancy way of saying he’s giving himself sleep deprivation, but what can you do when you’re working all day and helping out a dead man at night?

It’s been a week since his first encounter with Ghost Hamlet and, at this point, he’s convinced he’s the real deal. Not because of any deductive reasoning, but he feels it in his bones, and he figures he could allow himself to trust his intuition just once.

 

His schedule goes as follows:

6:00-10:00: Breakfast, morning consultation with Fortinbras, running errands

10:00-13:00: Writing Hamlet’s manuscript on his phone during breaks, lying to Fortinbras about being alright, denying the need to see a psychiatrist

13:00-13:30: A castle worker comes in with a tray of food, realizes he hasn’t eaten lunch, invites them to stay and eat with him, they never do

13:30-17:00: Work until the end of his official work day

17:00-1:00: Write, skip dinner, write some more, mandatory emotional breakdown in front of his bathroom mirror, a trip to town to buy rosemary flowers for Ophelia’s grave, mental brainstorming for the next item

1:00-3:00: Discuss with Hamlet, try to figure out why he keeps visiting every night

3:00-6:00: Sleep, with fourteen alarms set for later

 

Listen, he’s not stupid. Horatio likes to think that, for the most part, he’s pretty damn smart, and he _knows_ this isn’t sustainable. But right now, he needs to work. He’s just thankful he remembers to keep his phone charged and has easy access to coffee.

 

Speaking of: It’s early in the morning and Horatio is nursing his second cup of black coffee—lately, this is the only time he finds himself able to generate full, coherent thoughts. He’s walking along the path next to the stream (he finds a breath of fresh air makes the effect last longer) when It happens.

Something reaches out and clasps his ankle, not painfully, but firmly. He stops dead in his tracks.

He thought he’d gotten past being haunted by the deceased of Elsinore.

Still, the time for overreacting passed after his first encounter with Prince Hamlet’s ghost, so even though he feels his stomach lurch in his chest he sets his cup down and lets the spirit pull him into the water. Her grip loosens when he’s waist-deep, so he rests there and watches her head emerge above water, takes her hand when she reaches out for him.

“Hello, Ophelia.”

She tilts her head, sending some damp flower petals stuck in her hair toppling to the surface of the water. “You aren’t kicking and screaming.”

“Would you rather I were? Hang on, I’ll get back up, we can start over.”

Ophelia’s actually corporeal, unlike Hamlet—still, skin free of saturation, haunting the river? She’s clearly a spirit as well. Horatio remembers a creature along these lines in a mythology course a few semesters back… if only his brain weren’t so disorganized, and if only he’d cared to retain that information back when he’d encoded it.

For all his fuss about Hamlet, she’s clearly stuck further in the realm of the living; Ophelia’s a marvel, scientifically and confusingly so, and he can’t help but stare. At this point, what separates her from humanity? He moves a finger to her wrist–no pulse, no heart beating–and takes note of the stillness of her chest–no breaths–and her eyes–unblinking. Is that it? Is that all?

“I was waiting for you to come to the river for so long, you’re the only person who won’t get me exterminated…” She laughs. “Like a bug! I wanted to ask if you could bring that rosemary to me directly, instead, Horatio. I see you with it all the time and I hate to watch the flowers wilt the way they do… I can’t get out of the water. I tried, and I can’t. If I had them I could start a garden, if they had water they could live with me…”

Horatio rubbed his thumb against her knuckles and remembered the exact circumstances surrounding her death. He can’t quite discern whether her current speech is more the work of a mad young woman or a grieving corpse and nothing more.

“I’ll bring them to you next time. You got it.”

(He could swear there’s a name to describe something exactly like her.)

Ophelia nods, doesn’t let go of him. “I see you walking the castle all the time, inside and outside. I really want to get up and walk again, I really do. It looks like you see so much—why is your light on all through the night? I see a lot too, you know.”

(The spirits of disastrously and tragically unloved women who drowned by their own accord… Where was that textbook he sold to some freshman back at Wittenberg when he needed it?)

“What?”

“Something’s happened. Something’s happening, isn’t it?”

Horatio never talked to her all that much, but every time he did he felt the intense urge to pull out a Sharpie and draw a third eye on her forehead so he could remember it was always there, always unable to have the truth withheld from it. This time wasn’t any different.

“Hamlet appears every night.”

“Alas, my undead thunder is stolen!” She laments, dripping with sarcasm. “He does? For how long? Can he move? Can I see him?”

 

Horatio sits on the bank of the river for a while, answering Ophelia’s questions (yes, about an hour or so, no, no), updating her on recent events, allowing himself to be fully submerged in order to receive a very odd but nonetheless heartfelt underwater hug. He promises to visit her every morning.

It’s a mess, really, the two of them interacting. Neither bring up those who died or the fact that they’re both still in love with the ghost who visits the castle every night.

 

\---

 

“All due respect, dear assistant of mine, but why in the fresh fuck are you soaking wet?” Fortinbras asks when he passes him in the hallway.

Horatio shrugs. “Looking for flowers,” he says, and goes to the bathroom to find a towel.

 

\---

 

And it goes on like that for a while.

Horatio’s possible list of Hamlet’s loose ends that need tying grows day by day, ranging from items such as “uncleared internet history” (to which Hamlet vehemently denies!) to “unfinished script for that one play he wanted to write” (“I _was_ writing it, like actually in the process of it, I swear, but I don’t think that’s it.”). Nothing intense, nothing biting.

“Maybe it’s me.” Horatio suggests one night, half hoping and the other half dreading that it is.

“What?”

“Have you ever meant to say anything to me? Do anything? I’m only suggesting because I’m the only friend of yours still breathing…” Which was a pretty technical way to exclude Ophelia—Horatio'd told him about her, which only led to an increase in the prince’s cabin fever and a lot of messages he has to deliver between them morning and night.

“I don’t think so. By now you should know everything I ever had to say about you. It’s implied, at least.”

“What does that even mean?”

“It’s not you.” Hamlet asserts. “Keep looking.”

 

Which was how he ended up sitting on Hamlet’s bed, trying to find any Wikihow articles that pertain to assuring ghosts pass on properly into the afterlife instead of avoiding them (there aren’t any. Like, how prejudiced?).

But hopefully snooping around his room would help—he has express permission, after all. Also, doing this during his lunch hour helps to avoid Fortinbras’ nagging. For a guy allegedly having such a hard time adjusting to kingship, he had a lot of time for worrying about those he cared about. Side note: when did Horatio become someone he cared about?

Contents of the room: Lots of sketchbooks, emo band posters shamefully stuffed into a drawer, an easel that functioned more as a coat hanger, a full mirror (cracked, he notes) that didn’t have any business looking that expensive for its mundane use, an almost unsettlingly large transgender flag (Horatio half-jokingly wonders if it’d be alright to borrow), too many blankets for too much money, a couch, a bookshelf full of Hamlet's very specific dark Romantic taste (the AMOUNT of Poe!), a wooden human skull, a taxidermied rabbit, dark purple curtains, a corner desk, and, sitting on that last item, a simple black diary with a ribbon bookmark.

Hamlet had, after all, given him permission…

Horatio opens up to the last filled page.

 

_It’s falling apart. It’s falling apart._

_So, I fought Laertes in a grave tonight. Quick Q: What the fuck has my life become? Needless to say, the plan is failing, I’m failing, Ophelia’s dead and I deserve to die._

_Cool, great, awesome._

_Why am I not dead? Horatio encouraged me to do whatever normally calms me, and I don’t know if writing here helps or hurts, but I’m doing it. I remember taking an intro to psych course and learning about how even after one’s brain understands there’s no need for excitement, hormones have already been introduced into the bloodstream. The endocrine system is slower than the CNS. The endocrine system seems pretty inefficient—life would be a lot smoother if our bodies did everything our brains tell us to. Now I guess I have a lot of adrenaline and nowhere to put it, and I almost lashed out at Horatio but I think, really, that he’s a marvel to be considered above science, because he put one hand on me and everything melted away. No more baseless hormones._

_(No, around him, the hormones make perfect sense. HA!)_

_Scratch that. If I did everything my brain told me to, I’d be dead by now. Why am I not dead?_

 

He runs his fingers through his hair and realizes how red he’d gotten. _Not much there for my purpose_ , he tells himself. He flips to a random page.

 

_I like talking. I think I like talking so much that when no poor fool wants to listen to the dumb shit I have to say I talk by myself._

_There’s a difference, I think, between talking to yourself and by yourself. Talking to yourself can range from innocent pep talks to little reminders—the difference between “Alright Ham, you’re gonna not fuck everything up today” and “Hamlet, don’t forget to brush your teeth” isn’t very large. Talking by yourself is a different category entirely, because often it consists of talking to another person when another person isn’t there and you know another person isn’t there but you don’t feel it and you want someone to be there so bad and nobody’s there. Or everyone’s there and it’s not the person you want._

_Talking by yourself is a widow of 7 years asking “Do you want coffee or tea this morning, darling?” to a dead figure in the kitchen. Talking by yourself is a Danish prince asking anyone that’s not there if he should cut the cord or not or mentally writing a suicide note that never gets written. Talking by yourself is something different entirely._

_So when anyone asks, “Is Hamlet talking to himself or by himself?” I think that’s probably one of the best questions they could possibly ask._

_The problem is that I can’t ever make myself shut up. I don’t know if I should, even._

 

Horatio scans the pages he’s read so far. He flips between them again and again, picking up words and phrases: scratch that, not dead, if, never, I don’t know if I should.

On other pages: Maybe, maybe not, if, but, would it be good, I don’t know, whether or not.

He closes the little black book and carries it back to his own room for safekeeping.

 

\---

 

“You’re a Rusalka,” Horatio says to Ophelia one morning, with the certainty of Hagrid asserting _yer a wizard, Harry._

“I’m a what?”

“It’s a type of undead creature originating from the death of an entirely loveable yet sadly unloved woman who drowned. I thought it hit the nail on the head.”

“Hmm.” Ophelia hums, buries half her face in the water, considering. “Rusalka. I like it.”

 

\---

 

The thought of forgetting the specific name for the creature Ophelia had become had bothered him so much that a few days after speaking with her he’d gone into town and bought a comprehensive guide to most mythological creatures, alive, dead, and undead, in order to remember the name of Rusalka. He realized after the fact that the book could be of use for Hamlet.

Granted, most ghosts in this book are said to be evil, but he’s choosing to blame ignorance. After all, not many people have the firsthand experience he does.

It’s funny, to think oneself so ground in logic and then not question his regular conversations with two deceased souls.

It’s funny to still be thinking of a journal entry where one subtly implies he’s in love with him.

He shrugs it off and focuses.

 _Whatever the type of ghost may be_ , the book says, _it is most important to define their reason for visiting the mortal world. Often, it’s as a result of unfinished business, and this is the stuff popular culture likes to portray because it makes for interesting plot. But sometimes, ghosts appear as they do, however powerful or limited in tangibility and appearance, simply because their soul was not ready to leave, and they’ve since not accepted their death. This is a lesser known cause of haunting because, really, what kind of writer would make a ghost’s purpose for appearing they didn’t want to leave? Now then, in identifying the specific type of ghost…_

Horatio closes the book and runs his fingers along the spine.

Well, it’s his best bet.

 

\---

 

“You read my journal?”

Horatio wants to correct him with _it really felt like more of a diary, my lord,_ but he bit his tongue. “I skimmed some. You gave me permission to look through anything, didn’t you?”

“Well, yes, but that’s hardly relevant, it’s just where I write about—”

“About what? What’s in here that would harm you instead of letting me help?” Horatio’s grip on the book turned his knuckles white. He could swear the curtains in the room were billowing, but without any wind—Hamlet couldn’t affect objects, could he? “The way I see it, my lord, the fact that you’re so concerned proves what I’ve been thinking. You still care about the living world, you still consider yourself a part of it.”

“I only care about you, Horatio.”

That may or may not have sent his heart spiraling out of control, but, nonetheless, he continued. “Sweet lord, there’s a large difference, I think, between an odd, aesthetic fascination with death, mortality, and the concept of suicide and actively planning out your own suicide down to the t. And, correct me if I’m wrong, but as I see it you never did the latter.”

Horatio thinks he’s on the right path until Hamlet’s face grew panicked. “Don’t do this. Don’t try to psychoanalyze me. Don’t be the thousandth person to try and place me on a scale of perfectly satisfied to clinically depressed.”

“My lord, what—”

“I don’t want to die!” Hamlet screamed, and the curtains were really moving now, the brass pole clattering back and forth, but Horatio could have sworn it wasn’t Hamlets doing. Hamlet seemed to recover from his self-inflicted daze after a moment and continued, softening his tone: “Didn’t. I didn’t want to die, Horatio. I didn’t want to leave.”

Horatio flipped through the pages of the journal mindlessly before looking back up. “Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it. Mary Shelley, _Frankenstein_.”

“Why are you reading this out?”

“I know it’s one of your favorites, and you quoted it somewhere in here. My point is: I know you didn’t want to leave, my lord. I’m not trying to stick you on a scale, I’m just saying, if your desire to cling onto life despite hardship was that intense… I think that’s sufficient enough to act as the reason for keeping you here. I know it, actually.”

For the first time in his life and death, Hamlet is speechless.

“Yeah, I… I think you’re right.”

“The thing to do now is figure out how to deal with it.”

 

Horatio thought long and hard about how to go about giving Hamlet’s soul rest. He’d thought about it so much and appeared so worried that Fortinbras made him take a day off. Now, he rests at a conclusion like a tentative mother hen incubating the egg of a stupid, stupid idea, and he doesn’t have the heart to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

He’s just not entirely sure it’s a _good_ or _realistic_ or _practical_ or _beneficial_ course of action, or any of the words he used to like to let govern his life. He’s also not entirely sure what Hamlet would think about it, so he sits on it.

It isn’t until one night, when Horatio’s wondering why it feels like the tiles are softly shaking beneath his feet and Hamlet makes his fourth comment in fifteen minutes about wanting to reach out and touch him that he becomes determined to finally crack that egg.

It’s going to take a lot of work.


	2. Pumpkin-colored Cloaks and Mild Traumatic Brain Injury

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> imma be real with ya'll hamlet isn't even in this one im pullin an act 4 situation please read this monster of a chapter anyway it was very very fun to write

Horatio’s rapidly tearing through his most recent paycheck.

Granted, being a royal assistant pays a  _hell_ of a lot better than being a full-time student and a part-time minimum wage worker for whatever place wants to hire him seasonally. Free lodging, a boss that generally doesn’t yell at him, and the authority to pretty much do whatever he wants. It’s cushy, or at least it would have been if he weren’t a) constantly wanting to throw up at the idea that he was still in this jail cell of a castle and b) trying to hide his most recent, most annoyingly expensive purchases from that one dubious-looking shop downtown. Consisting of: a hand-me-down homemade  _Necromancer’s Manual_ , a more general _Grand Grimoire_ , and an odd vial of oil the clerk shoved into his hands after seeing him in the shop for the fourth time that week, right before suggesting he wear a hood next time. Draped over his elbow is a dark orange cloak he purchased in an innocent little boutique, feeling out of place with supplies for dark magic concealed in his bag as the employee rushed about trying to find him the best match to his hair and skin tone.

The point is, he nearly drops all of this when he opens his door to find Fortinbras, barefooted, dressed in a purple blouse and designer slacks, sitting on his bed and looking entirely bewildered at the contents of a small fabric bag closed taut with a ribbon that had been sitting on Horatio’s nightstand.

“Horatio, are these  _teeth_?”

Which, yes. Well.

 

 

Two weeks ago:

“I’d rather be doing anything else,” Horatio mutters to himself, heart beating rapidly, shovel to the warming ground, gloved hands rubbing off the dirt from an ornate coffin. Struggling, he hoists it up, opens it, and promptly drops the lid of the casket back down, realizing he’d forgotten to put in his nose plugs. And, well, Hamlet  _smells_ , and not in the way he did when he dissociated for three days and forgot to take a shower for a week. Less barely-alive, more barely-dead.

Alright, one more time, smell of decaying flesh stopped properly this time. He pries the lid open and pulls out his tweezers. Plastic gloves open a decaying mouth, and they pop out rather easily. He takes three for good measure, and closes his lips again. He tries not to stare at the corpse before him, knowing the spirit attached to it would probably hate to be seen in such an unflattering state, but can’t help glancing at the hands folded over his chest as he closes the casket.

“Contrary to popular belief,” he whispers, reciting a forensics professor back at uni, “The fingernails don’t continue to grow after death. Neither does the hair. This also solves that nonexistent mystery of why toenails and beards don’t ‘grow’ as well. During decomposition, the body is quite literally eating itself, and the skin dries out. This makes nails and hair look larger by comparison… In other words, it’s all one morbid optical illusion."  _Maybe, when we look at cadavers, you’ll get to see it,_ she had suggested.

Horatio spends a good while shoveling the dirt back into place, then peels one glove off, runs a hand through his hair, and stifles a laugh. They never did end up visiting the cadaver lab that semester—some lawsuit the school didn’t want to deal with for an intro class. He wonders what that professor would say to his adventure in independent study.

 

One Week Ago:

Horatio likes writing notes.

Apparently, he’s one of the hardest people to shop for—something to do with the fact that he starts avoiding people when they ask what gifts he’d like, his possession of every book under the sun, his tendency to only share anything about himself with two people (a long list made up of his mother and Hamlet), and that he tends to impulse buy any little trinkets anyone could dream of getting him before the cashiers can say, “Welcome! Need help looking for anything?” He may or may not have had an army of small bird figurines sitting on his desk at Wittenberg. The result of all this is that mostly everyone knows him only as a student, and a very diligent one at that, so he ends up getting about five to ten notebooks every birthday or Christmas. And the thought of a mountain of unused notebooks only stresses him out, so he finds ways to fill them up.

He silently apologizes to his old roommate. She really didn’t deserve for her journal to be desecrated with notes for elaborate dark magic rituals.

“What are you scheming?” Ophelia asks when he’s sitting at the bank of the river finalizing his plan and she’s tying pieces of grass together.

“Now, scheming’s a strong word,” Horatio replies, “I’d prefer something more along the lines of  _plotting_ or  _outlining_.”

“No, you’re scheming, I can see it in your eyes.” She frames two Vs around her eyes with her fingers and widens them. “Come on. Let me see. I hate secrets.”

Horatio itches his arm. He wonders if she’d hate him for knowing some of Hamlet’s secrets that he kept from her. That he’d dated her brother for a whole year of bad decisions when he was sixteen. The he’d told Horatio about that one night before finals when he’d kissed him on impulse and sparked a huge emotional breakdown on a side street close to Hamlet’s dorm complete with insistences of “I’m not gay, I’m not gay, Horatio, everyone’s going to keep thinking I’m a woman if I can’t get it in my head that I’m not—” followed by a season of adventures in homoeroticism to kick off a whole lifetime of bad decisions on Horatio’s part. Sometimes, he wonders.

There’s not any particular reason for Ophelia to not be in  _Horatio’s_  loop, however, so he flips the book around so she can read.

She squints at the pages and reads out loud what she can decipher. “‘Need DNA from remains, preferably bone,’ ‘something he’s strongly emotionally connected to (journal?),’ ‘chalk for the circle you dummy,’ ‘clothes are useful apparently,’ ‘a little bit of blood is needed so bring a knife’—Horatio, what is all this?”

He brings his notebook back to his lap and fiddles with the pages. “Hamlet used to have a running joke with himself about who seemed more witchy, you or him. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. I don’t think he ever considered me in the running, but I think I’ve won.”

“You’re planning on—”

“Resurrecting him.”

Ophelia puts on her expression of deepest sympathy, and her eyes look the most clear he’d ever seen them since she died, so he knows he’s in for something. “Horatio, look at me.” She leans out of the water as far as she can, and her voice lowers, softer, clean and real. “I don’t know what brought this on, I don’t know what he said to you, or what he’s asking of you. But I see your light on at nights and I see you running into town and coming back with arms full of books and I— I don’t want him to be stringing you along, I— Horatio, you  _don’t need him_. Don’t think that you need him that badly.”

“He didn’t ask for this. He doesn’t know yet.”

“He doesn’t  _know yet?_ ”

They have a fun little act of incredulity and defense.

“I just thought—”

“Why?”

“He didn’t want to die and—”

“ _I_ didn’t want to die until he came along!”

“I’m just—”

“Why don’t you bring me back, then? Why don’t you bring back my father? Why don’t you bring back my brother? Why does it  _have_  to be Hamlet?”

“Ophelia, let me talk!”

“Horatio, let _me_ talk!”

Horatio hadn’t realized the droplets on his paper weren’t from the splashes of the river.

“Oh… dear.” Ophelia stops tries to wipe his tears, only making his cheeks colder and wetter with her hands. She stares at him, then, throwing all hesitance out the window, brings his head to rest on her shoulder. “Listen, just for a second, and then I’ll hear you out. I don’t want you to end up like me, I don’t, I don’t. I don’t want to talk to Hamlet anymore and I want you to stop being our mailman because it’s a habit I can’t get rid of. I want you to be able to breathe fresh air and feel the blood in your veins and I want you to live—” Horatio chokes up, wondering what she would think of his attempt to drink poison— “and I’m worried, I’m so worried that Hamlet is the exact opposite of living life to the fullest.”

They sit there like that, for a second, and Horatio’s pretty sure he’s ruined another outfit with river water. He takes in a shaky breath.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about it. You’re different, because you came back as something physical, and I don’t think magic would help your heart start back up again. Which is funny, because, as far as I know, you’re powered entirely by magic right now. And that’s something I didn’t believe in up until a few months ago.” He pulls back and watches the water ripple. “Hamlet’s—well, first, I’ve found he didn’t want to go. The sort of natural, human want to stay alive, he still had that. I remember once I read about survivors of suicide attempts and how they’ll describe this _moment_  of regret this lingering moment right after they swallow all the pills or jump off the bridge or kick the chair behind them, and how, the ones that survive, how they’ll wish they could reverse time in that moment.” He suddenly remembers who he's talking to. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

“It’s quite alright. Go on.”

“It’s just that, I guess we all thought Hamlet wasn’t capable of that moment. But now I see it in him and I get it and—a few days before he died he stood up straight and understood who he was for what looked like the first time in his life and then it just ended. And I really didn’t like the ending, Ophelia. If things end with me crying alone and surrounded by corpses as some awkward Norwegian gets crowned, first off, that’s pretty odd, and second, that means I’m due for a very,  _very_  shitty life.”

“You didn’t tell me it happened like that.”

“Well, I spared you the details.”

“The details, sure.”

“I don’t like to talk about it.”

Ophelia nods and runs her fingers through her hair. They watch the foliage blow in the wind for a while.

“You know,” She starts, “I’ve always wanted to shave my head. Or at least cut my hair.”

“You have?”

“Well, yeah. It’s always been long, and it’s kind of boring long, isn’t it? Everyone else seems to find it alright but I don’t and I never have and I think it’s due for a change. Plus, I’ve heard it just feels lighter. It’d be great to have some of my hair dry, if my head’s above water long enough, I guess, and I’d feel less like I’m fighting gravity all the time. If it feels lighter, it’s got to be better, right?”

Horatio runs his fingers along the surface of the water. “I grew up with long hair, because—yeah, you know. When I cut it, it wasn’t for that reason, but it is a lot lighter. Comfortable.”

“It sounds fantastic.” Ophelia decides, and pauses, waiting to say her next line. “Listen, I haven’t known you long, but I know even in your worst moments you’re smart. Not, like, memorizing flower names and meanings smart, not being able to place every country’s capital on a map smart, but the real kind, it’s there in you all the time. If you think this is for the best, and if you think the world would be a better place, I can’t really stop you, I mean, that’s a given! But if you’d be happy, I’d be beside you. If your head would be lighter and all that.”

“I love him.”

“I know. You’re not very skilled at hiding it. Makes me think you never were trying to.”

“I don’t know what’s making me so ready to pour my heart out tonight.”

She points up, directly at the sky above. “Tonight’s a full moon. Destabilizes people. You get higher highs, lower lows, odd impulses…. Of course, your unconscious is probably just intelligent enough to know you need someone to talk to.”

“You keep saying I’m intelligent.” Horatio remarks, “I think you should be telling that to a mirror.”

“Oh, my head right now’s a little out of whack. I’m just trying to figure out how to get this weight off my shoulders.”

 

Now:

There’s some moments in a person’s life in which they wish to all the forces that be that it could be fixed even though it could not possibly ever be without time travel. Then, the person will wish for time travel, and be gently reminded by the forces that be that we’re all still kind of waiting on that. There’s nowhere to go but forward, and nothing to do but accept the situation no matter how mortifying. So, when Horatio’s boss slash Denmark’s king slash this guy who thinks he can be Horatio’s friend and clearly has too much time on his hands asks him if he has a small bag of teeth, he chooses a double punch of confidence plus a logical fallacy:

“Yes. Did you break into my room?”

Fortinbras stares at him open-mouthed. “Well, it was open. Why, might I ask, do you have a bag of teeth?”

“Why, might I ask, are you snooping on your humble assistant?”

Fortinbras tosses the bag onto the bed and points to the laptop sitting on his lap. “I was… worried, about you, and it was open and… I read your draft.”

“You  _what?_ ”

“It’s concerning, what you’ve written here, I mean, I understand part of it’s true, the deaths and all that, but—you expect me to believe a ghost of King Hamlet appeared, really? And Hamlet’s philosophical rambles? I’ve heard he was just, well,  _like that_ , but something about it leads me to believe you—”

Horatio gently sets his bag on the floor and lunges for his laptop.

“—to believe you’re feeling something like that too, and Ophelia’s—hey!” Fortinbras jumped back, clutching the laptop to his chest.

“You looked through my room!”

“It’s not as if it was locked!”

“It’s not as if you have the right to invade my privacy!”

“I was  _worried!_ ”

“Frankly,” Horatio cries, pulling his laptop from his hands, “I don’t give a shit,  _my king_. In fact, it’s not very royal of you to rely on sneaking around to get information out of me. That’s fucked up.”

“You won’t tell me anything in the first place!”

“And you think this is going to help that?” Horatio pauses and places his laptop and bag in the corner by his door. “Listen to me very carefully. We’re not friends. You can’t tell me you know or don’t know what I saw, what I heard. You can’t tell me I’m lying. And you sure as hell can’t tell me you’re not just meddling in my business for entertainment, because I know you have much better things to be doing than trying to make me second-guess my own memory.”

Fortinbras balls his hands into fists, takes a deep breath, and unclenches them again. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Horatio.”

“Now get out.”

“I know this was really stupid but—you’re the only person here who knows jack shit about practicality, and economics, and realism, and running a country, and anything, honestly.” Fortinbras says. “I can’t lose that. I don’t want you going insane or dying on me. I know I was raised for this, or something like this, but I can’t help feeling horrible at my job. Everything would fall apart, you have to understand.”

And Horatio feels that, on some level, at some point, he’d forgotten Fortinbras is around his age. His frame may be a bit bulkier and his voice may project a bit louder, but beneath that he’s always just been a kid who lost his dad. And Horatio can sympathize with that—in fact, it reminds him of a certain someone.

He’s still being a right asshole, though.

“If you want me to understand,” he says, hands folded across his chest, fiddling with his cloak, “ _You_  have to understand this. I’m not lying, nor am I going insane. These events are exactly how it happened. Ghosts, pirates, murders, and all.” He pauses. “Ghost. I meant ghost, singular. And you can’t do this again. You can’t invade my privacy like that.”

“Okay, okay. I still don’t believe in them, ghosts I mean. But if you’re so set on it, then perhaps—”

A crash from the east wing, the sound of a heavy object being thrown through a stained glass window.

They share a look and start running.

 

\---

  
Ordinarily, Horatio would be flipping the hell out seeing fencing supplies, carpets, curtains, tables, chairs, and even some floor tiles swirling around the entertainment room, but his past few months put this in the realm of reasonable possibility. No, his real problem is that His Noble Majesty got decked in the face with a tile two seconds after opening the door, and now Horatio’s carrying an entirely passed out noble who’s getting blood on his sleeve. Which, by the way, ups his count of ruined shirts to three.

Of course, he’d love to get him to a nurse, but the way the other useless workers are running away in terror after investigating the situation, he thinks his first priority should be to find a way to stop whatever (likely whoever) is causing the furniture to displace itself.

“Hamlet?” Horatio tries, remembering the way the curtains shook when his prince yelled in desperation a few weeks back. But no, no that’s not it—sure, his spirit is tied to this room, but it’s not the right time, and he would have told Horatio of any specific poltergeist-y abilities.

Plus, the way the furniture seems to stop in midair, turn on him, and circle around him and Fortinbras like vultures tells him his guess was wrong. He wouldn’t be this angry about it, and whichever spirit is controlling these objects seems to harbor some kind of bitterness towards Hamlet as well. Horatio scrambles. Someone who died in this room—Gertrude certainly didn’t hate her son, Claudius did but wouldn’t aim to personally harm anyone else—it has to be someone without restraint, someone who dramatically over exaggerates their abilities, someone who, upon gaining some type of power, would not hesitate to toy with it—

 _Why don’t you bring back my brother?_ Ophelia asks in his mind.

“Laertes, stop!” Horatio cries.

He hears a soft  _what? Shit_  echo through the room, and the tables fall to the ground, tiles clatter and break and fall down, and the long red carpet falls directly on top of the two figures.

Followed by a long, nervous laugh. A short, vicious-looking boy appears before him, glitching in and out of existence like a hologram. He stumbles forward and pulls the carpet off of them. “Oh fuck! This is real!” He exclaims, and studies Horatio. “Aren’t you Hamlet’s new boy toy?”

“Horatio, and—” He shakes his head. “Nevermind. Is this your first time being here?”

“Well, I  _guess_ not, but honestly I thought I was dreaming or clear in the afterlife for a long time there. And I figured I’d mess around, see what I could do. It’s all a bit fuzzy, you have to know that.” He pauses. “Wait a second, you’re the voice I’ve been hearing talking to Hamlet every night! I thought you’d killed yourself.” He smiles, but it has an air of fakeness to it.

“Nice to see you too.” Horatio says, and kindly gets slapped in the face with the corner of the carpet.

Up until this point he’d assumed that Fortinbras, trying to act like a reasonably mildly unreasonable sane person, would panic and break for it if he happened to wake up in his assistant’s lap from a blow to the head only to find a barely-visible spectre hovering a few feet before him and pretending to sit backwards on a chair. Instead, Denmark’s savior, the half-conscious noble king, seems to choke on everything Horatio expected him to say and mutters, “Whoa. Cool.”

“I like this guy! Who is he?” Laertes leans forward on the chair and knocks it over and really, that  _had_  to have been on purpose.

“Technically, he’s the king of Denmark.”

“Technically I’m the king of Denmark!” Fortinbras shoots up, then falters under a dizzy spell. Horatio makes a startled noise and holds his head up. “Horatio, you didn’t tell me ghosts could be fresh as hell.”

“I think you have a concussion, sir.”

“Oh I most definitely have a concussion.”

Laertes is cackling, which, there’s a guy laying on the floor with a mild brain injury that he caused, and Horatio thinks that’s just a bit insensitive.

“Ham—King Hamlet couldn’t do this. Laertes is unique, I think?” Horatio offers.

Laertes scoffs. He’s laying on the ground too, one hand pretending to prop up his head. “Oh, come  _on_ , Hortense, just tell him already.”

“Horatio.”

“That’s what I said.”

“Tell me what?” Fortinbras pipes up.

Horatio tries to protest: “This really isn’t the best time, we should get you to a hospital.”

“I’ve been in a war, I think I’ll be okay for a ten minute story. I’ve just learned ghosts exist and there’s a poltergeist in front of me, I am _not leaving_.” He adds on, jokingly: “And that’s an order from your king.”

He sighs. “For a few weeks now, Hamlet’s been appearing here in the middle of the night, just for a short time. He can’t connect with reality or do anything really but talk, so every night I’ve been… just talking with him. It’s not that complicated, I guess.”

“It gets  _very_ emotional.” Laertes adds.

“Shut up or I’ll personally make sure you go to hell when your spirit moves on.”

Fortinbras wriggles himself into a sitting position. “I knew you were hiding. You were hiding  _things_.” He says. “But I still don’t get the teeth….” He mutters, leans over, throws up, and promptly passes out.

So, add Horatio’s pants to the ruined clothes bin. Three outfits. Three whole outfits.

“Did he say teeth?” Laertes asks.

Horatio sighs, pulling out his phone to call an ambulance. “That part’s a little more complicated.”

 

\---

 

One week later:

 _So, this is new,_ Horatio thinks as Fortinbras keeps watch for him during his second adventure in grave robbing. Actually, can it be called grave robbing? It’s not as if people are using their bones anyway. He closes the casket and starts filling it back in, allowing Fortinbras to finally breathe—he may or may not have forgotten to remind him about plugging his nose, just to get a small bit of revenge. After patting the soil down, he looks at him , removes his gloves, and jingles his second bag of teeth, which is something that he never, ever imagined would be a real actual phrase that applies to his life.

 

“Horatio,” Fortinbras had said after getting back from the hospital, at which he thought he had made a very clear point with the not visiting him and all, “Explain the teeth.”

“I don’t know. You might spontaneously combust.”

“Explain to me why my assistant has a small collection of real human teeth after coming into contact with a deceased friend and buying some particularly creepy books,” he says, “or I’ll just put the puzzle pieces together myself. I’m asking you to explain yourself here.”

Horatio sighs. “Well, you may want to sit down.”

 

“I can’t believe this!” Fortinbras shouts, pacing the throne room.

“Sir you should probably sit—”

“No, I can’t believe this.” He opens his mouth, but falls to another dizzy spell and lets Horatio help him to his seat. “I can’t believe… you’d find a way to resurrect the dead and not even think of helping the other one.”

He’s a bit taken aback, to say the least. “Laertes?”

“Yes! Don’t you value everyone?”

At this point he’s lost his  _all due respect_  nonsense and cut straight to the point. “Dude, I really don’t have the resources for that. Plus, the way I’m constructing it is very specific to Hamlet, and every individual would take a lot of time and energy—”

“Then I’ll do it.”

And he can’t really come up with an argument for that.

 

So, here they are. Walking back from a graveyard in all black at a time when only the frogs and owls are awake.

 _Why don’t you bring back my brother?_  Ophelia asks in his mind, and Horatio wonders what she’s going to say when he tells her tomorrow that he plans to do just that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ;-) if i dont write laertes well moving forward you have permission to repossess my kidneys


	3. Knives and The Long Haul

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> oh dear oh gosh golly

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> things that happen offstage in this one (these aren't spoilers and instead are just for kicks):  
> -Fortinbras spends twenty minutes doing his hair every time before he goes to talk to Laertes  
> -Horatio tells Ophelia about Laertes and on an unrelated note buys two water guns for river shenanigans  
> -Horatio spends longer than need be trying to explain that when Hamlet comes back he won't be wearing clothes, to the point where both he and ham are awkward disasters, and Laertes appears just to cackle at them  
> -Marcellus updates his daily log with "Horatio is still acting strange and erratic" for the fourth week in a row
> 
> tw for talks of self harm in varying forms!

Horatio doesn’t know at which point he stopped working. Sometimes, the pressure of not being able to work makes you push even harder, and suddenly when all the tools are laid in front of you it’s harder to get to work, it’s overwhelming—there’s no wall to break down and no extra steps to take, and yet it’s so easy to become paralyzed. A writer, when given a newer, speedier laptop that doesn’t freeze and crash every half hour will feel something missing in the way his keys don’t stick and his internet browser runs smoothly, and as a result will sit and stare at a blank screen trying again and again to write another chapter but finding himself choked with the simple fact that he has no excuse of being held back by anything but his own fear. Likewise, everything Horatio had fought against and used as an excuse to justify to himself his slow progress was gone, as Fortinbras has grown wise to his lack of sleep, his heavy dependence on caffeine, and his tendency to ignore the signs that his body was failing him. As the king was recovering from his injury, the dizzy spells seemed to pass from one person to the next, and he ran to Horatio as he stumbled and caught himself on a wall one morning.

“You’re pale.” Fortinbras said.

“I’m fine.”

Horatio was in bed breathing shallowly by lunchtime, trying to justify his case for not needing a doctor. It’s only a few days before he’s back on his feet, but now he’s being tailed constantly by concerned staff with specific instructions.

And, he hates that he does, but he feels a thousand times better than before. Sure, he’s still a bit shaky, but getting an amount of sleep closer to double digits and eating regularly and not spending every free moment of his time busy working on something sort of… makes him feel better. Who knew?

Getting rest is good, he keeps telling himself. But, as he takes the melatonin Fortinbras got for him when he reported his insomnia night after night, he wonders how many hours he’s losing and how much more he could possibly be doing and, mentally, he’s following himself around with an employee review sheet and being marked down for every little thing he does. Going to bed two hours earlier than usual, that’s a loss. Spending time to cook himself dinner, that’s a loss. Of what, he wonders? He has more free time now that he’s finished writing, but still. His draft is just sitting unpublished on his laptop because he doesn’t know the logistics of publishing a record of watching someone die firsthand when he’s planning on erasing that whole thing. He worries. What, even, are they going to tell the world? Surely Hamlet would want to be seen in public just once in a while, and he doesn’t want to freak everyone out. Mentally, he’s concocting a whole story—he had to fake his death for safety, he didn’t want to become king so he pretended to give the crown to Fortinbras, whatever. Horatio should be a hell of a lot calmer, but still. Still. Still. He doesn’t like standing still.

 

“You’re alright.” Hamlet’s voice is filled with relief the moment Horatio opens the door when he finally woke up to his alarm in time to catch the prince when he was still present.

Horatio realizes he’s been getting ahead of himself; he hasn’t even asked Hamlet what he’d like yet. One foot in front of the other.

“Sorry, my lord. I got sick.” He says.

“No apologies, I’m glad. Call me Hamlet.”

“Sorry, my lord.” He says with a smirk.

They fall into easy conversation, making small talk that isn’t really small until Horatio can remember the reason he’s here.

“I have to, um,” He starts, mouth suddenly dry, “I have to offer you something.”

“What?”

“I’ve been doing some research, if you could say that, and, ah, I think I have a way to bring you back. Alive.”

Hamlet is silent. He prepares himself for something, but he doesn’t know what.

“Why?” He asks.

“What do you mean?”

“Why on Earth would you want to do that?”

“I,” Horatio hadn’t really expected to have to justify himself, and yet. He should have. “Is wanting to have you here not enough? You didn’t want to die, I figured that out for you. Maybe I didn’t want you to die either.”

“So it’s in your own self-interest?”

“So what if it is?” It isn’t. It isn’t, it really isn’t. Is it? “If self interest is predictable and steady… I can’t… I can’t bear it sometimes, Hamlet. You were young, and now people keep telling me—I keep being told it’s more of a surprise that it wasn’t by your hand than the fact that you died at all. I can’t go back to Wittenberg, I don’t know what they’ll say to me. I don’t know if the place would have any life without you. Isn’t that enough? I care about you, what’s the problem with self-interest?”

Hamlet reaches out to Horatio and cups his cheek. It’s just cold air. “Horatio, I can’t ask you to do this for me.”

“Can you ask me to do this for myself?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know if me being around would actually help you.”

“It would, of course it would.”

“I seem to have hurt everyone else in my life. I don’t want to hurt you.”

“You’re learning. That’s alright.” He pauses. “Listen, there’s something else you should probably know.”

“What?”

As if on cue, a chair flies towards Horatio, and he ducks and lands, panting, on the floor.

“Yes, well. Laertes may or may not have been here the whole time?” He says, sitting up.

“I know I’ve said this a lot in the past five minutes, but _what?_ ”

A portion of the floor seems to warp and rise up as Laertes appears in front of them. “You—you fucking asshole!”

Horatio sighs. “I know you don’t like me by nature, but could you just explain what I did?”

“Maybe selective resurrection rings a bell?”

“Wh—” Horatio’s still reeling from the first flying object and braces for one that never comes. He has time to explain, then. “Fortinbras hasn’t told you?”

“What hasn’t he told me?”

Really, he truly expected Laertes to know already. Fortinbras had been talking with him a hell of a lot with the excuse of “He wants to make sure I’m doing well, plus I’m sure he needs some company.” He’d gotten a little bit more accepting of the bullshittery that Horatio had to scramble to deal with ever since meeting Laertes. Sometimes, he sees him stumble out of the entertainment room at various times during the day, face lit up like a kid opening their first present on Christmas, a stark contrast to his usual poker face (and honestly, as glad as Horatio is that he’s happy, it’s all a little unsettling). That was new. Everything seemed new with him, now. So, he just figured that Laertes already knew, but he guess he’d never discussed it with either of them, so it’s a little bit his fault.

“He’s sort of. Taking care of you in that department.”

“Fortinbras is?” Laertes looks bewildered.

Hamlet pipes up. “I’m sorry, are we just not mentioning the fact that Laertes has been here the whole time? Why didn’t I notice? Why didn’t _you_ notice?”

“It’s complicated.” Laertes and Horatio say at the same time and, wow, that’s the first time they’ve ever been in sync.

Laertes seems a little… jittery. Parts of his form snap in and out of existence at a faster rate than usual, and when he notices the two staring at him it only gets worse. “Horatio, you never answered me. Fortinbras is,” He pauses, “He’s doing that?”

“Well, he volunteered, so I should hope so.”

“He’s… oh.”

“Of course, if I won’t be preoccupied with another spirit, I’m assuming I’d just take over.”

“Fine!” Hamlet cries out, arms raised in surrender, and the other two turn to him. “Fine, fine, do it. Do it. I’d like to be alive again, alright?”

Laertes collects himself and shakes his head. “I’ll leave you two to it. Ask Fortinbras to come here in the morning, I’d like to talk to him.” And he vanishes.

Horatio feels lightheaded. “If I guilt-tripped you or something—”

“You didn’t.” His look of desperation sums everything up. “I’d like to, Horatio. I need to.”

And just like that, everything was in order again.

 

\---

 

“Put the book down, Horatio.” Fortinbras says when checking in on him, a habit he’s taken to as of late. “It’s been three hours. People aren’t able to focus well after just one.”

“Technically it’s been five, if you count me helping you earlier.” Horatio mentally kicks himself.

“You’re not really helping your case, you know that.” He sits on the bed next to him and holds his hand out. Sighing, Horatio saves his place, gives him the book, and closes his own notebook. “Notice that I stopped after two hours. Take a break once in a while.”

“I can’t. I’m planning for tonight.”

Fortinbras raises his eyebrows. “You’re doing it _tonight?_ ”

“I have nearly everything ready, don’t I?”

“You said it’ll take a full day to complete. Is this you requesting a day off?”

“I guess so. Excuse me, sir, but I need to use a sick day for probably dubious rituals, is that alright?”

“Oh, only if you’re okay with me doing the same in a couple weeks.” They both laugh. “But really, I don’t know if tonight’s good for you. You need rest.”

“I’ll be fine,” Horatio asserts, “I should be able to handle myself.”

“Key word is should. You haven’t been, lately.”

“I will be.”

“I’m,” Fortinbras says, and for a moment his posture wavers, “I’m not perfect either, you know? I did this to myself a lot, too. This thing you’re doing. I’d starve myself for days as punishment for not doing enough or whatever, and I tried to fight like that. I ended up going on pure adrenaline and collapsing afterward.”

Horatio sometimes forgets what Fortinbras had been doing before he came to Elsinore. “Yeah, but that was in battle. Real, physical battle, sir. I’m just doing some simple job. I should be doing as much as I possibly can—you’re _allowed_ to have a hard time in battle.”

“Life’s a battle, idiot.”

“Excuse me?”

“Like, who are you to decide who’s allowed to have a hard time or not? And I know if we keep talking about this, you’ll end up admitting you think it’s only you who shouldn’t be struggling, and that’s stupid as hell. So let yourself be for three seconds. Recognize that what you’ve been doing is a form of self harm and work on it. Christ, I’ve been trying to help for as long as I’ve been here.”

Horatio tries to argue, but doesn’t really have any ground to do so. _He’s right,_ he realizes while swallowing some of his pride, and starts to mourn his era of ignorant self-destruction. “You have. Maybe not in the best way, but you have helped a bit.” He flops down on the bed. “When did you become my friend?”

Fortinbras smiles. “Don’t worry about it. I’m just good at showing up when I’m needed.”

They sit on Horatio’s bed in silence for a while, and he remembers their argument in this room. He wonders what he would have done if neither of them knocked any sense into each other.

“I think I’m in love with Laertes,” Fortinbras says out of the blue, and Horatio shoots up.

 

In the back of his mind Horatio likes to propose questions to mull over, he likes finding solutions to them, likes the fake sense of accomplishment and now it has the added bonus of helping him still feel like a competent human being after failing to find a way to keep Hamlet alive in the first place. Things like “What would we do if Denmark got caught up in World War Three?” and “How can I worm my way into the economic advisory committee without being a proper elected official?” and “Should I even try to finish my Masters after this long break?” the answers to which range from realistic to absolutely absurd. For the most part, they’re occupational concerns, so Fortinbras obviously comes up sometimes. However, “What should I do when the king of Denmark has a schoolboy crush on a dead man?” though interesting, surprisingly never showed up on Horatio’s list of questions until now.

“We talked this morning,” Fortinbras says, “About, you know, the whole resurrection thing. And he looked at me and I sort of just _knew_. How did you know with Hamlet?”

Horatio flushes. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Sure you don’t.”

Ouch. Second person to point this out in a week, he’s getting sloppy. “It’s like. A sort of warmth whenever he’s around, a comfort, but something that pumps your adrenaline at the same time, I guess. Like you could either move a mountain or cozy up on the couch and it doesn’t matter.” God, this is embarrassing. “There’s a sort of dread with the idea of him suddenly not-being when you’ve grown so attached to him being. Here, that is. Does that ring a bell?”

“A bit. Save for that last part, I guess I should wait for a while to sort myself out, yeah? You’re known him for a few years, so it’s only natural.” He looks down and notices the necromancy book is still in his hands. He sets it by the pillow. “How did you know you were… that you liked men?”

He grins at his consideration. “You can say gay, I’m just gay.”

“Right. How did you know you were gay?”

“It, hmm,” That’s hard to think of, really. “It just came naturally, I guess. Gender was a longer journey for me than sexuality.”

“You’re trans?” Fortinbras says, voice raising in pitch, and for a moment he thinks _oh fuck_ but his expression looks more surprised than hateful.

“You didn’t know?”

“I’m new here! Plus, your whole life isn’t exactly televised like Hamlet’s was, how would I know? I guess it doesn’t really matter, though,” He shrugs, “Just doesn’t help me that much.”

He winces, remembering his own Queer Struggles™. “Sorry, I wish I could just tell you what you’re feeling, but I can’t really. Plus, don’t you listen to Taylor Swift?”

“Your point?”

“I’m just saying, I don’t know how you only just now have the inkling that you’re not straight.”

“ _Plenty_ of straight men enjoy her music!”

“Sure.” He says, and Fortinbras shoves him surprisingly hard on accident. Why does he keep befriending people skilled in combat?

Fortinbras rolls his eyes and changes the subject again. “Listen, can you just get some rest? Don’t do it tonight.”

“...I’ll wait another day.” He says, and fights the part of himself that wants that to be a lie. Realistically, he knows he’ll collapse if he doesn’t take more time to recover, so. He’ll try.

 

\---

 

“Tomorrow,” He tells Hamlet that night, and he looks the happiest he’s been since winning an argument with his tech professor the week before hearing of his father’s death.

 

\---

 

In the meantime, he spends his lunch break wandering by the river, intending to pay a visit to a very specific friend of his. He catches her struggling under the water.

“What’s going on?” He asks, standing by the shore, choosing to abandon any formal greeting. “Someone’ll find you if you make this much noise.”

“Oh, Horatio!” She jumps and turns to wave to him. “You’re just in time.”

“For what?”

She bites her lip. “Remember how I said I couldn’t get out of the water?”

“Yes, that was sort of the basis for why I passed your messages to Hamlet along, wasn’t it?”

“Oh, how is he?” She asks, seeming to forget her insistence to not speak with the prince anymore, along with the track of the conversation.

“You told me you didn’t want to speak with him.” Telling Hamlet that went, oddly, better than expected. He’d just nodded and stared off into space, accepting it.

“I can still be _considerate_ ,” She rolls her eyes, “But fine. My point—I think I know why I can’t get out.” He motioned her to continue. “It seems I’ve been down here for so long the plant life has grown around my legs. If I could just pull against it, or cut it somehow…”

“Sorry, how didn’t you notice this sooner?”

“My neurons haven’t exactly been working so well since they all died. Would you like to experience sensation as only felt by magic, Horatio? It’s not as romantic as it sounds.”

Well,” Horatio says, suddenly at a loss for words, “I can get you a knife.”

Her eyes gleam. “Give the crazy woman a knife… I like your style."

 

\---

 

“Fortinbras, we’re going to have a visitor, and you can’t let on to anyone else but me that she exists.” He tells him, leaned close so no one else can hear.

“I… You know what, alright.” He must be having a stressful day if he’s so agreeable. “May I ask who she is?”

“Ophelia.”

“Laertes’ sister?!” He exclaims, and Horatio squeaks and covers his mouth.

“God, can you shut up?”

Fortinbras pulls his hand away and finally brings himself down to a whisper. “Isn’t she dead?”

“Yes. Well, no. Well, technically?”

“I take it this is something else you’re going to have to sit me down to explain.”

Horatio smiles shyly and motions to his pocket concealing his knife. He must be a sight, what with the cloak he’d been making a habit of wearing, packed pockets, and towels tucked under his left arm. “Yeah. I’ll be right back for that. Can you just make sure I can escort her to the entertainment room safely?”

 

\---

 

Horatio almost starts worrying about Ophelia being under the water too long, until he realizes who it is he’s thinking about.

She’d excitedly shouted when he presented her the knife, announced that the first thing she would do was see Laertes, and dipped under the water to cut herself free. And this was about five minutes ago.

“I can’t get all of it!” She finally announces, head emerging from the water. “You’ll have to do it.”

He sputters. “What makes you think _I’d_ be able to help? I can hardly hold my breath!”

“Oh, dear. I forgot about that. Maybe just get me a flashlight, then?”

“I don’t exactly have an underwater flashlight handy on me.”

She sticks her tongue out, points the knife at him, and sinks back underwater.

“I can try to get one later today!” He shouts, absentmindedly wondering if anyone ever saw him talking to the river. He hasn’t caught up with Marcellus in a while, and perhaps the guard doesn’t talk to him thinking he’s gone mad. All his friends now, in fact, are a little more mad than him—a rusalka (now with a knife), a vision of a babbling prince, and a king who was beginning to appear less and less heterosexual. Laertes can hardly be called a friend, and yet he’s still somehow caught up in all of his business.

“Ha! Did it anyways!” Ophelia says, in the middle of his crisis about his odd relationships with those around him.

She smirks and digs her hands into the dirt, pulling herself up without too much restraint. Once she’s about halfway up her whole face paves itself with uncertainty, but she pulls her legs ashore until only the tips of her toes get splashed with the current. She’s calm as she throws the plants back into the water, picks the algae off her toes, and cuts the last few remaining ropes free.

“Well.” Horatio says, and he almost just stops there, because that’s all that can really sum up this morning: _Well._ “Shall we?”

He offers her a hand up, and she takes it, but when she’s finally standing and looking a little dazed, she glances at the knife still in her other hand and back to Horatio. “Just one thing,” She mutters, and reaches behind her, gathers her hair at the back of her head, and slices it off with the knife.

“Here, you’ll want this back, yes?” She says, offering him his knife.

“You know what, keep it.” He smiles, examining the long wet ropes of hair now laying abandoned on the ground as he offers her a towel. “Let’s go see your brother.”

 

\---

 

That proves to be an interesting affair, to say the least. It's the first time Horatio sees Laertes soften a bit, with a surprised “Ophelia?” to an overjoyed “Ophelia!” and he circles around her, his form quite literally buzzing with excitement.

“I hadn’t known you—”

“I didn’t either, until Horatio—”

“So what’s the deal with—”

“How are you—”

“Okay, okay,” Laertes says, “First things first, and this is very,  _very_ vital. I love the hair.”

She laughs, and the air feels fresh again.

 

\---

 

It’s a perfectly ordinary work day, save for the fact that he’s anxiously checking in on Ophelia every half hour (who refuses to stop talking with Laertes, but it’s only natural) and being not-so-passively requested to take a half day to rest by Denmark’s very own mess of a king, a motion which he consistently denies. On his way back from an absurdly boring diplomatic meeting, he responds to emails in the back of a cab, and finds himself more and more restless. On his way to his room, as he’s triple-checking his alarms, he starts to worry if he’ll even be able to rest beforehand. He falls asleep when his head hits the pillow.

 

\---

 

“Sorry, Ophelia, I suggest you leave. I don’t trust you’ll want to be here when Hamlet is, anyway,” Horatio announces without any small talk, and Laertes groans in frustration, but waves goodbye to his sister as she sneaks off to her room.

“Should I too? Technically I can’t, but it’d be nice to see how it’s done,” Laertes asks.

“I read that your appearance might confuse it, so it’s best that you not be here, sorry.” He’s lying, partially. It should be alright as long as he stays focused, but Laertes isn’t exactly one for aiding concentration.

“Right, then. Good luck.”

“That’s the first nice thing you’ve said to me, I think.”

“Best not push it, then. Don’t get the idea that I care about you or that royal snob of yours.” He vanishes before Horatio has time to ask whether he meant Hamlet or Fortinbras.

As he draws the magic circle with a shaky chalk line, filling in sigils and arranging his candles and carefully selected objects, he mentally prepares himself for the day ahead and takes inventory of his bag. He’s got a bottle of water, a granola bar, a bottle of ibuprofen, and a rejuvenation potion bought from a dubious-looking woman by the magic shop he frequented. He hopes that last item isn’t posion, because it would alleviate all his needs when things got a bit hairy. Which, when trying to complete a 24-hour ritual, is inevitable.

“Is this it?” Hamlet asks when he appears. “Seems a bit simple.”

Horatio sighs. “Well, that’s the easy part—the process isn’t. Get in the circle,” He commands, opens up the first of many notebooks (as the full text took up a total of fourteen), and turns to the page where he started to transcribe the incantation.

He wavers. “If this doesn’t work—”

“It will.”

“If it goes wrong—”

“Are you doubting me?” He asks, and they hold eye contact before Hamlet breaks away.

“Let’s get on with it, then.”

Horatio pulls out his scissors, offering the lazy explanation of "I gave my knife to Ophelia," and slices his thumb, letting a bit of blood drop in the bowl in front of him before pressing a piece of gauze against it. He slides the bowl to its place in the circle, and while he's at it, double-checks everything else: the journal, the wooden skull, the teeth, and other, more varied components seem to be in place.

"Alright," He says, definitively, "Let's."

He clears his throat and begins reciting.

 

\---

 

He at least feels awake for the next twelve hours—a gift thanks to his tendency to overwork himself without break, granting him endurance—but trying to find places to stop is the difficult part. More and more often his throat dries up and he has to reach for his water, then he looks back to the page and panics—if he loses his place it’s all for nothing—before finding the right spot and picking up again. The ritual makes Hamlet’s spirit stay in the circle, so as the sun rises his glowing form becomes harder to see but still definitely there. Around the ten hour mark Horatio looks up and trails off, noticing that he looks more saturated, his colors a little less faded.

“I’m feeling something,” Hamlet says softly, “Continue.”

He nods and finds his place again.

 

\---

 

Fourteen hours in he uses the rejuvenation potion, because he can only ignore his bladder for so long, and a large part of himself worries that he wasted something that’d be vital later, but it works and he can stand without wanting to faint again. His throat is still scratchy, though. What a ripoff.

 

\---

  
Sixteen hours in he’s starting to lose it. Whether _it_ is his voice or his mind, he can’t be sure. Either way, he’s going slower now, finger tracing the paper on his tenth notebook he’d written the continuation for the incantation in. He stops for yet another coughing fit.

“Could you just whisper it? Hamlet says, shakily reaching out but trapped by the circle.

Horatio guesses that would have to do. He takes another sip of water and continues, whispering.

 

\---

 

Eighteen hours in he’s starting to wonder where he is, what he’s doing. What’s his name again? Recitation is an autopilot setting, though he’s careful not to repeat or skip lines. One mistake and… and what? One mistake and both of them are through, that’s right. Who?

He stops again. _The potion,_ he thinks, and digs up the bottle.

 

_Jack’s Temporary Ambrosia_

______________________

_Effects: Rejuvenates mind and body as if having received a full day of rest._

_Side effects: Confusion, dizziness, temporary amnesia, general disorientation, dry mouth (rare), internal bleeding (rarer), heart attack (rarest)_

_Time elapsed: Takes three minutes to take effect. Effects last ten hours. Side effects may linger._

_NOTICE: This product is not an energy booster, upper, healing potion, or anything of the sort. So stop calling it a healing potion, Madison._

 

_Jack’s Potion Company - cruelty free, no animal testing!_

_Contact us via portal channel 4206. No fees apply._

 

He really should start reading labels, he thinks as he pops an ibuprofen and tries to push through the confusion.

 

\---

 

Four hours left, or twenty hours in, depending on whether it’s easier to see the glass ⅚ full or ⅙ empty. He’s on his twelfth notebook and, while physically the world is in perfect clarity, everything’s foggy and spinning around him. Without the side effects of the potion he’d be able to handle his drowsiness, but as it is it worsens everything.

He allows himself pause and falls to his knees.

“Horatio?” He hears, but it sounds like it’s coming from oceans away. Nevertheless, he looks up, and sees the half-formed figure of a beautiful man who looks familiar but he can’t quite place the name of. He carries the air of nobility, but lacks composure, both mentally and physically. The man sweeps his hair to the side and calls out to him again.

Horatio slowly gets back up, finds his place, and continues.

 

\---

 

Twenty-three whole hours and he’s taken to pinching himself when he loses track of reality, but it doesn’t help much. It takes all of his energy to stay standing as he recites, but he’s confident he’s doing well. At what, he can’t be sure, but he doesn’t have time to concentrate on that for now. Twenty-three hours, an empty bottle of water, a granola bar wrapper, and an empty bottle of potion. He can’t really feel his tongue, but that doesn’t matter. His throat feels like it’s on fire, and that’s what does.

When he looks up, the man from before is there again, looking alive and healthy, but—but something’s not right, still. He looks back down and continues. Maybe if he continues, he can help him.

 

\---

 

As Horatio recites the last word of the last page of a day-long sentence, the circle in front of him bursts into blue flames—then cools again, leaving a scorched mark on the floor. He closes his mouth and looks up, and the man is still there.

The figure in front of him, fleshy and solid and _not wearing clothes,_ yikes, he can’t believe he hadn’t noticed. Impulsively, he pulls a bundle of clothing he didn't know he had out of the bag next to him and all but launches it at the man, who thanks him and quickly dresses himself. When he feels it’s safe, Horatio looks back at him to see him carefully stepping out of the circle towards him. He backs away, and the man draws nearer.

“Horatio,” He says, a look of worry on his face that makes him look positively _adorable_ , “Are you alright?”

Horatio nods and stares at him in wonder. “You’re real.” His voice comes out scratchier and quieter than he wants it to, and sends him into a coughing fit. “If I could just—” He reaches out for the man’s hand and presses his palm against his. “Touch…”

He giggles, and watches the ground grow closer and closer.

“Fuck—Horatio!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if youre confused about the fortinbras and laertes thing and how that even came about in the first place dont worry! im even MORE confused!


	4. Scrambled Eggs and a Strange Coin

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you for all the sweet little comments in the sneak peek i published! the full chapter is finally here, it's a little longer than normal, and it is a Doozy. this is turning into a combined hamlet + r&gad fic just because i like r&gad a lot! but dont worry if you havent read it: this makes about as much sense as if you would have.
> 
> also, i've found in researching for this fic that paranormal investigators/enthusiasts don't tend to agree on many conclusions, so half of the Ghost Facts are, in fact, pulled out of my ass/an amalgamation of skimmed wikipedia articles. enjoy

Horatio wakes up, like most days, exhausted. His throat burns and he’s sweating from the unnecessary amount of blankets on top of him and the sun is beaming through the open curtain and directly into his eyes—this exhaustion, he notices, isn’t from a lack of sleep, but rather indicative of the bleariness of oversleeping. It’s disorienting. He peels each layer off as if throwing them all off at once would cause irreversible damage to the world around him, and leans to step off the side of the bed when, to his surprise, his foot hits something soft and warm. He doesn’t look down.

_Hamlet._

Instead of facing a bleeding world now scabbed, he slides off the foot of the bed, picks out a change of clothes, and tiptoes to the bathroom to get ready. It may be late afternoon, but what is he without routine?

The complications arise when he finds himself unable to keep himself straight—he has to put a hand to the wall just walking to the bathroom, and in the shower his body shakes, his knees give out, and he slips, yelps, and somehow steadies himself against the wall. Carefully, he lowers himself to sit. He can’t exactly function normally; his balance is all off, is it an inner ear thing? Is his vestibular sense off? Whatever’s happening, there’s more of it, he notices when he turns off the faucet and is hit with a sudden wave of heat. Vertigo and fever. He can deal with this. He manages to change and digs through the medicine cabinet for some ibuprofen.

There’s a knock on the bathroom door right as he’s about to step out, and he opens it to find Hamlet, looking tired as fuck but noticeably opaque.

“I heard a crash. Are you alright?” He says, staring at him with concern as if it’s perfectly normal and everyday to fuss about this stupidly mundane worry roughly thirteen hours after his entire body was reconstructed and soul replaced into a vessel. Because that’s normal, isn’t it?

Horatio’s pathetically hanging off the door for balance, and honestly, he doesn’t know what to say. “I’m,” he chokes out, “I’m fine.”

"Your voice sounds horrible.”

“Hi.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that would happen?”

“You’re amazing.”

“You can’t compliment me, I’m worried about you!”

“Excuse me, my lord. I have to throw up the only thing I’ve eaten in the past twenty-four hours, which I’m pretty sure is just a granola bar.”

He slams the door closed and Hamlet shoves his fingers in between before it can shut. “Ow, fuck!” He winces. “Let me help.”

At this point Horatio’s on his knees leaning against the counter, and everything’s _spinning_ and Hamlet’s here and why is Hamlet here and is this some stupid joke there’s no way that worked and—“That’s new for you.”

“Someone modeled it well for me.”

The rose colored glasses crack when Horatio feels something rise from his stomach and leans over the toilet. Hamlet holds his hair back, the toilet bowl smells like chemicals and then something disgustingly organic, before he presses the handle and now it’s just back to chemicals. He just changed his clothes and now they’re already sweaty from the fever.

They’re doing a dance. He pulls himself up, rinses out his mouth, and even though he knows it’s bad to brush teeth right after vomiting he still does because there’s no way he’s leaving that taste in his mouth. Hamlet hovers around him, making sure he doesn’t pass out or fall or whatever he’s concerned about. It’s all domestic and he doesn’t know what to do about it, because this isn’t just. Normal.

“Can I just lead you back to bed?”

“You want to walk me seven feet?”

It goes like this.

Horatio flops onto his bed that he doesn’t remember getting in last night (he half-expected to wake up alone on the floor of the entertainment room, maybe with Laertes laughing at him) and has a cold flash, to which Hamlet responds by covering him with the blankets he’d thrown off. Then he goes hot again, and kicks his way out of them. Repeat.

“This isn’t how you expected your second first day of being alive to go, is it?”

Hamlet reaches over and pinches Horatio’s nose. “I didn’t expect a second first day of being alive at all.”

“Can you just…” He grabs Hamlet’s shoulders and pulls him onto the bed, in between Horatio and the mound of blankets. “There. Easier for temperature control.” He shivers and leans into him. “Sorry. Cold.”

Hamlet looks like he’s about to say something when Horatio’s phone rings sharply and loudly. Add headache to the list of symptoms as well. It’s an unrecognized number, but he answers it anyway.

 _"_ _Horatio!”_

“Who is it?” Hamlet asks, and Horatio quietly shushes him.

“Who is this?” He asks.

_“You sound horrible, are you alright? Your undead pseudo-mermaid friend. I’ve got something for you. Or, someone, rather.”_

“Wait, Ophelia? How’d you get my number? More importantly, how is your phone still active?”

_“Oh! Well, dad had the phone bill on automatic payments, and no one’s called to cancel his cards and payments, all those loose ends. Which is perfect, because I was positively dying without a phone. What if my internet friends thought I’d died? Well, I did, oh, but that’s not the point, yes—”_

“What is your point, anyway?”

_“Do you remember Rosencrantz and Guildenstern?”_

“Is this related?”

_“Would I ask if it weren’t?”_

“Yes, how could I forget them?”

_“There’s this girl named Alfred I think you should meet. She knew them for a moment.”_

“Aw, you broke our question streak.” He pokes Hamlet in the cheek at his mouthing of _are you two having banter?!_ and continues. “What’s so important? What about Ros and Guil?” Hamlet shuts up after hearing those names.

_“Yes, well, there’s a problem, see. They’re sort of trapped. Alfred saw them at the dock where the boat took off.”_

“Sorry. Trapped?”

_“I’ll explain. We’re in my room, I just didn’t want to go up the stairs and interrupt you—you’re with Hamlet, right?”_

His face flushes and he’s blaming that on the fever. “If you’re implying anything, I’d like to cover all bases and say you’re wrong. Hamlet’s here.”

She pauses. _“Tell him to wait in your room, I’m not letting him in.”_

“So you’re the supermarket to his dog?”

_“Horatio.”_

“I love both of you, you know.”

_“I’m only not saying what I want in case he can hear this.”_

“I’ll be there soon. I appear to be in poor health but rest assured that I’m in the prime of my youth.”

_“I’ll warn Alfred you’re a little out of it. Are you okay, though?”_

“I’m fine, it’s just my throat. Talking for 24 hours kind of scratched it up, I think.”

 _“Well...alright.”_ He could hear fumbling and a muffled exchange on the other end. _“Be here soon, then! I’ll see you. Oh, could you bring some food for Alfred? She hasn’t had anything to eat in too long.”_

“I just woke up. I’ll bring two plates and we can turn it into a dark lunch date.”

_“Perfect.”_

She drops the call.

 

\---

 

Alfred’s a small, shivering girl wearing glorified rags, who, upon glancing at, Horatio immediately feels the need to protect. Against what, he can’t imagine. Ophelia informs him she found her by the bridge, and that currently, she’s homeless. He resolves to free up another room; at this point, it’s go big or go home.

She can also wolf down scrambled eggs record-fast.

“I was in this… acting troupe, that was on the boat with them,” She says, finally bringing up the topic at hand as she’s shyly clutching her cup of tea and Horatio’s only on his fifth bite of waffle. “Before that, they talked to me, a bit. Found out I didn’t really like my job, you could say? Got me thinking…” She shakes her head. “Point is, I can recognize them, and I’m telling you those things down by the docks, they’re Ros and Guil, sir.” She adds on a _sir_ as an afterthought, seemingly by habit.

“Things at the docks?” Horatio asks, or a part of himself does, at least. He’s caught up in feeling at home again, sat on the floor of Ophelia’s lavender-scented room with paint stains on the rug, thinking back to stolen food as a kid, scraps eaten at midnight, and smuggled dining hall sandwiches in his dorm at Wittenberg.

“You haven’t heard of them?”

Ros and Guil sucked sometimes, and they never seemed to like him very much (or perhaps that was a manifestation of his own anxiety) but they did make very good grilled cheese sandwiches. And they thought up the whole thing of spreading jam on them, which was surprisingly delicious.

“I guess not.”

“It’s in the news… people keep seeing these balls of light floating at the docks, where the boats come in, on the water. And the appearances started only after our ship came back, the one with Ros, Guil, and Hamlet on it, as well as my troupe. Well, on the way back it was just me, the rest of the Tragedians are in England, but you know what I mean. Something happened, their spirits came back on the ship somehow, and now they’re haunting Elsinore harbor.”

When we came back to Denmark, I thought I’d have to tell someone what happened because my boss clearly wouldn’t! But then no one remembered them, and most who had a chance of caring were dead.” Alfred says, clutching a heart shaped pillow to her chest. It hurts a little, to know he wasn’t accessible enough for her to reach out to him on her own. “So now I’m here, what, working minimum wage without anyone around, all because I thought I could tell the story of two guys I didn’t even know that well?” She groans and pushes her face into the pillow. “This is so stupid!”

“Hey, no it isn’t—” Horatio’s scrambling to console someone he’s just met when Ophelia jumps up.

“I’m going to talk to Hamlet. He’s still in your room, right?”

“He’s,” He doesn’t even have time to ask _what’s going on_ before he instinctively answers. “He’s in my room, yeah.”

She nods and starts marching down the hall. He looks back and forth between her and Alfred before deciding to follow her with an _I’ll be right back_ , catching up as she slams open his door and fixes her eyes on the man now sitting up on the bed.

“Ophelia!” He shouts with feigned joy, trying to pull the _hey I’m back!_ card before getting to why he’s the target of a death glare.

“How do you deal with yourself?”

Horatio’s keen to just stand back and let this play out.

“What?”

“You’ve known those two your whole life—I get they’re not the brightest but how _dare_ you do that to them?” Her arms are now wildly gesticulating. “You know, you could have said anything in that letter! Could have made up a trade agreement or something, but no, you just had to add to the body count, didn’t you? Was I not _enough_? Did you need to destroy more people who used to adore you?”

Hamlet looks scared out of his mind. “What do you mean, were you not enough?”

She looks like she’s about to blow a casket. “I can’t. Deal with this right now. I can’t.” She closes the door and slides down against the wall, all energy lost. Horatio sits on his knees in front of her, partially as a comfort and partially because he needs to stop standing for a second.

“Do you want to talk about it?” He asks to test the waters, and she just shakes her head. He nods and tries to think of something else to discuss. “How exactly did you meet Alfred?”

She pauses. “Oh, we should go back to her.” Except she doesn’t move to walk back to the room, and Horatio’s sure she forgot the question before she speaks up. “I just wanted to go into town, and somewhat jokingly I was hoping I could make some friends. I don’t know if I’ve told you this, but I was thinking I could maybe even get back into the dating game now that I’ve sworn off Hamlet. Stand by ponds with a vacant look in my eyes and all, be enticing. Actually, I think a lot of women are into the undead pseudo-mermaid thing. But that’s not the point.”

“You’re bisexual?”

“You didn’t know?”

He considers. It makes sense, anyway. “So you were hitting on Alfred?”

She sputters out an indignant, “No! I was on a tangent. We were just talking.” She shakes her head and gets up, offering her hand. He takes it and they make their way back up the stairs. “I was just going downtown, as disguised as I could be on the off-chance someone recognizes me, though that’d be rare. Still, it’s cold, so I’m allowed to wear layers and a scarf. And by the bridge—that small pedestrian one I like to walk over whenever I’m outside—there’s Alfred sitting and she looks cold, so I offer one of my jackets and my scarf because I can’t really feel temperature well anyway, and she recognizes me. She was one of the actors, we’ve met before. But she doesn’t freak out, so we get to talking because what have I got to lose? I explained some stuff. At some point Ros and Guil came up, but most importantly I found she doesn’t have anywhere to stay tonight, so we came back here. I think you’re caught up.”

They walk in and sit back down next to a very confused Alfred.

Ophelia makes no move to catch her up and just keeps going. “Horatio, I don’t know how to talk to him. I think I have to, at some point, but he just doesn’t know _how_ to consider others.”

“He’s learning.”

“I can still be angry.”

“Of course you can.” He tells her. “I can talk to him if you want.”

“No, I’ll do it myself now that I can.”

Horatio nods. “Anyway. I came here for a reason, right? Tell me about those lights, Alfred. They’re always together?

She shakes herself out of her bewilderment and confirms. “Two, never separate.”

“Then it’s probably them.” He runs a hand through his hair. “Alright, game plan.”

Ophelia pipes in when she sees his cogs moving. “Horatio, shut up. You’re recovering.”

“It’s only a mild fever!”

She gasps and scoots closer to Alfred as if that’ll protect her from any airborne sickness. “A _fever?_ ”

“A mild one!” He whines. “Of… of about thirty-eight degrees.”

“Go to your room and lay down forever.”

“Wait. Okay, wait.” He just wants to sort this out. “I’ve got a theory, yeah?”

“What.” Ophelia deadpans.

“They might be orbs. I didn’t think they were real, because they appear mostly only in photos, a lot have been debunked because of camera activity, but if people are seeing them in real life…” He trails off, and maybe it’s the fever or the caffeine he definitely should not have just consumed, but he genuinely feels _excited_ , and picks back up again: “We should investigate! Go down there, but at night when it’s less likely to get yelled at by people and they’re more likely to appear. If they’re orbs, it means they’re connected to something—Alfred, is that boat still in the harbor?”

She shakes her head.

“Oh, don’t encourage him by answering.” Ophelia murmurs.

“Is there anything of theirs you took from the boat?”

She shakes her head again. “No, I… Oh.” Alfred blushes. “Maybe. But I didn’t think…”

“What did you take?”

“They gave it to me. That’s odd…”

“Alfred, what did they give you?”

“A coin.” She looks up. “Just a coin, that’s it. One. I couldn’t find it after I got back, thought maybe I’d gotten pickpocketed or, well, I guess I dropped it in the harbor.” Fit with the first clear realization of her life, she puts her face in her hands. “Oh, and that’s them, isn’t it?”

“I think it very well might be. We’ve got to—”

“ _We’ve_ got to get some rest,” Ophelia stands and collects their empty plates. “And by we, Mr. I’m-Above-Human-Recovery, I mean you. If anyone’s above normal biological functions, it’s me and only me. Run off back to your little asshole boyfriend and curl up in your blankets.”

“He’s not my boyfriend.”

“In time.”

“I was going to get a room sorted for Alfred first, actually. Would you rather that wait?”

“Actually, I’m fine staying in here.” Said Alfred interjects. When both pairs of eyes turn to her, she shrinks a little. “For the time being. If that’s alright. If you’re comfortable with that.”

Ophelia exclaims “Of course I’m comfortable!” the same time Horatio reassures her “That’s perfectly alright!”

The rusalka turns back to him. “No excuses now! No work. Fever reducers, water, and sleep. We’ll find out the Mystery of the Haunting of the Docks later, Nancy Drew.”

He huffs. “Nancy Drew is one of the most brilliant characters of the twentieth century, I’ll have you know.”

“My point exactly. But even she knew when to stop.”

“Fine, yeah.” He lazily waves. “Nice to meet you, Alfred. I’ll get to solving your mystery soon.”

He’s all but pushed out, and she clicks the door shut behind him. Before he leaves, he hears a soft, innocent question behind the wood:

“Is he dating Prince Hamlet?”

 

\---

 

All Horatio’s thinking is that, for two men infatuated with two other men aside from each other, he and Fortinbras have been falling into each other’s arms a lot lately. He comes to this realization as he does just that as Fortinbras seems to be leaving Horatio’s room.

“Steady yourself, Horatio!” Fortinbras leans him against a wall and tentatively takes a few steps back. Horatio almost objects, but there’s no real fire in it and he’s wasted all his human conversation on Alfred and Ophelia. “You’re awake! Are you alright? Come down with something?”

Horatio nods, then shakes his head. “It’s either a fever from pushing myself so long or a side effect of the elixir I took. Which reminds me, I need to find you a better one to use—”

“What you _need_ to do is sleep. But—hey—question for you.”

“Huh?”

“How much does it suck? The whole process, I mean.”

He considers. The headache’s coming round again. “It’s worth it.”

 

\---

 

With two people nagging at him to rest, combined with his regrettable promise to actually take care of himself “as a self-sustaining human adult rightly should” (Fortinbras’ words), he concedes, and wobbles close to the wall until he’s finished with his expedition and back in his room. Hamlet is, surprisingly, still there.

Horatio sighs. “Look, I’m sorry about that.”

“No, no, don’t be. I deserved it.” He says, and before he can respond launches into a retelling of how Fortinbras visited him right after Ophelia. He’d left just a minute ago.

“Talked to me about royal business at first, I _think_ ,” he whirls around with his pointer finger in the air, “but he was talking so fast it could have been ‘oiled dishes’ or ‘malnutrition’ or anything that rhymes, but who cares about words anymore?” He waves a hand as if to brush it off. “He asked me if I cared about being king, and I said hell no. Said that cut a potential half-century’s worth of argument. Technically, I should be, but we’re working it out. I’m sure he’s doing a fine job of it anyway! He actually knows Politics and Numbers, and I say those with capitalizations.”

“Meanwhile,” Horatio jumps in, finally making his way from the door to sit on his bed, “if you think for two more seconds about politics right now, you might explode.”

“Ah, well. Correct.”

Horatio pauses to dwell on a matter. “If you mean you technically should be king, does that indicate you want to go public?”

Hamlet’s chewing on the inside of his cheek. “Was hoping you’d help with that. Some explanation aside from full-blown necromancy would be nice, no shade. Just that I don’t think the general public would, ah, believe that?”

“Maybe,” He hunches over on his elbows, “you had to fake your own death? Something about knowing Claudius’ plot? You can use me and say I was in on it. I set up a place for you to stay in France under a fake name.”

“Maybe, maybe.” He nods in serious contemplation. It’s still sinking in, the way their conversation is flowing naturally, as if Hamlet’s vocal chords weren’t pulled from the replicated mitochondrial DNA in his bones and rapidly synthesized as differentiated cells not twenty-four hours ago. Here he is, having, effectively, a conversation with a ghost who now refuses to be incorporeal. That’s his doing. It’s still sinking in.

Hamlet looks him in the eyes, ignorant of the pressing realization Horatio’s facing and says, soberly, “There’s one flaw, one very major flaw, with your plan.”

“What, my lord?”

“I hate France.”

Horatio snorts. “Italy, then.”

“Oh! Can it be Venice? I’ve always felt a vampiric energy emanating from that place.”

“You’d be drawn to that.” He pauses. “Can we actually? Visit Venice, I mean.”

He’s taken aback, as if he hadn’t expected anything to come of this conversation. “I—yeah, alright.” Then his eyes sparkle, and Horatio’s already surprised he’s even discussing leaving the house and existing out in the open but making abstract plans is an entirely new level. “Then, afterwards, we’ll stop by Rome. For you.”

“Now you’re just making fun of my interests!”

“I’m not the one who stayed up until three one night with a stack of library books on Roman mythology, _no_ , that’s all you, you’re practically writing the mockery yourself, my love!”

“And to think I almost jumped on a plane to Italy with you.”

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous, we’re taking a train.”

“That’s so long!”

“Have you no sense of adventure? Besides, what if someone gets murdered?”

“What, should I have a fountain pen, empty legal pad, and sepia camera filter at the ready in case you want to shoot the next _Murder on the Orient Express_?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Hamlet scoffs. “You’d be the detective. If I were, I’d get overwhelmed and climb out a window.”

“Is this why I’m your traveling companion? To curb your destructive impulsivity?”

“You’re missing the point. That’s why you’re my companion anywhere.”

Hamlet’s been pacing around the room, and he talks with his hands, in a dramatic, erratic, almost frantic sort of fashion. There’s no anger behind it, but there clearly isn’t a lot of thought either; the wit comes from his words (at least, sometimes). Horatio sits straight up. The task he’s been presented with is more important right now, and begs the question, that is, the Question, that so often divides who he loves and the ideals he supports.

“Why’d you put Ros and Guil to death?”

Hamlet stops all movement and stands still by the foot of the bed. “Well, that’s hardly a good transition.”

“I didn’t mean,” He pauses, “I didn’t ask at the time because you seemed out of sorts, melancholy, whatever disposition you had greatly deteriorating, whatever, all those romantic, stupid, idealized versions of pain all spinning in your head and—but I don’t get it. They were stupid sometimes, but as long as they were together they were fine, fun to be around, even. They didn’t need that.”

“I’ll, uh,” He sits by his side, “I’ll be clear with you: I don’t think I’ve been alright for a very, very long time. Not that that makes anything right. Ophelia’s proved that well enough.”

“Keep going.”

“I didn’t know what I was doing, alright?” He’s picking at the skin at the back of his hand, scraping it so it’s turning red. “I saw that Claudius tried to put me down like a dog and I panicked. I didn’t know if they knew. I just switched them. And whatever reason I try to say won’t justify that. Sometimes,” he pauses to take a deep breath, “Sometimes it’s like there’s a thousand different versions of me, enough to fit the perceptions of millions of people, and those millions of people are all arguing in my head about who I should be and how I should act, and why I act the way I do. Like I’m hearing them and not hearing them at the same time, because some people want me to hear them and some don’t. Like every other alternate universe of myself is a character who’s inevitably going to act in fits of despair and egoism and die, as it should be.” He faces him. He’s still picking at his hand, and it’s starting to bleed. “Ros and Guil happened in the blink of an eye. Sometimes, I think those voices forgot them, so I forget them too when I know I shouldn’t. After all, there’s more than the royalty and nobility on a chess board, right? The pawns deserve some credit. I was just playing a very stupid game of chess and they were in my way, so I swiped the board clean. Does that make any sense?”

“Absolutely none of that made sense, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t get it. I was looking for a more concrete answer if you had it.”

Hamlet doesn’t break eye contact, but he slouches more. His words come out in desperation: “I don’t know, Horatio. I really don’t.”

Horatio pushes Hamlet’s picking fingers away from his bleeding hand and clutches it to prevent any more damage. “Alright. It’s passed.”

“Why’d you ask?”

“Because I don’t know if I’m entirely finished with necromancy yet.”

 

\---

 

Ophelia’s made the executive decision that Horatio is allowed (and, frankly, is necessary) in this little nighttime investigation only if someone is there to ensure his safety, ergo, he brings Hamlet along. She reluctantly concedes it’s for the best, so they (being Ophelia, Horatio, Alfred, and Hamlet) gather in Ophelia’s room and collect the necessary supplies.  Horatio turns the keys to Fortinbras’ car in his hands. It’s lucky he’s the only one of the lot Fortinbras trusts, because he’s also the only one able to drive without endangering everyone.

They load into the car.

At nearly two in the morning four humanoid bodies head out to the shore in an expensive black car. In the seats: a greyed image of a beautiful girl who once had her wits about her, and insists losing her marbles was the best thing that happened to her, her newly resurrected ex-sort-of-boyfriend, decidedly less than graceful in his new legs, the small figure of a new friend in a borrowed nightgown clearly too big for her, and an exhausted driver in a dark orange cape currently using all of his energy to keep them on the road.

The perfect team.

They’ve decided to head out to investigate the sightings of the two bright lights off the shore of the docks, or, as they believe, the images of two lost countrymen.

(That is, they weren’t lost in war or anything, it was a very complicated ordeal. Technically, one of the gang is guilty of second degree murder. And first degree, twice, but that’s beside the point, and everyone can pretty much agree at least Claudius deserved it.)

(Oh, but you know this already.)

They hop out of the car parked a discrete walking distance away and hike to the shore where, on cue, two bright lights fade into view. Except they’re hard to distinguish as two, because they’re so tightly stuck together. “Who else could it be? They’re practically melding into each other.” Horatio asks, holding his guide like a Bible.

Hamlet fake gags. “Even in death, they’re disgusting with that stuff, huh?”

He doesn’t stop staring. “You know, they never got together.”

“Oh, yeah, but at the same time they’ve been married fifty years.”

“Boys,” Ophelia stands poised at the edge of the dock, “Can we stop chattering? You brought me along for a reason, didn’t you?”

Horatio nods and ruffles through his bag in the dark, then pulls out something triumphantly. It’s a waterproof flashlight, which would have been useful about a chapter ago. He tosses it to her, and she places it between her teeth (which have, in her posthumous transformation, sharpened) and dives into the sea in perfect form.

Alfred’s biting her nails. “Are you sure she’ll be fine?”

“Well, she’s a freshwater species, so who’s to tell?” Horatio jokes, but softens when she looks legitimately concerned and nudges her elbow. “I’m kidding, she’s fine. The real challenge is figuring how to communicate with them when we get that coin.”

She nods.

“Really,” The lights have disappeared, but he’s on a tangent now, “I’ve got to find a way, first, to give them more solid, consistent, and humanoid forms, then… what? There’s not a great way to resurrect them, their remains are in England, and I am _not_ traveling to England for some rotten cadavers that I may or may not find. What if they were cremated?”

Ophelia walks out of the water, flashlight in one hand, something gold and shiny in the other, dancing triumphantly. She runs up to them and tosses the coin to Horatio, who fumbles and drops it. She boos.

When he goes to pick it up, it rattles, lights up, and the two orbs pop out again.

Horatio stumbles back. “Right.” He mutters to himself, flipping through his book until landing on the right chapter. “ _In the case of orbs, it is very easy, from the earth side, to draw them to humanoid and responsive forms. It’s harder from their side. To do so…_ Ah! I remember reading this.”

“This stuff is real?” Hamlet asks.

“Well, sometimes, anyway.” He answers, and recites the small incantation as outlined in the book.

Blue fire sparks from around the coin until it begins to float, and spins. With it, the two orbs start changing shape, lines blurring until clear limbs, bodies, and heads extend from the previously fist-sized balls of light. One of their heads fall off, and they stumble to pick it back up and put it on, backwards.

“No, you’ve done it the wrong way again, Ros!” The other scolds, and spins his head around the right way. Guildenstern—or is it Rosencrantz? They could be mixing each other up again—turns to the gang and eyes them warily. “We’re not ready for the first act yet, what are you all doing here so early?” He points to Ophelia. “She’s not in the right costume. Have we changed sets again?”

“What the hell are you on about?” Hamlet asks.

Guil shakes his head. “No, no, all wrong. You don’t appear until a bit later. In fact, none of you do. Let us have our own spotlight for once, thanks Tom.”

“Do you,” Horatio asks, “Do you two know what’s going on?”

“Well, we’re waiting until curtains open, right?” Ros asks.

“It’s a cycle, you see.” Guil supports. “It’s bound to happen again. We live and then we die. Why do you ask?”

“And we’re dead now,” Ros traces the line of interrupted skin on his neck, “Clearly. So when’s the next show?”

Guil waves them off. “Whatever, we can wait. Let’s continue our lesson. I’ll start reciting one. _I cut off my head—_ ” He pulls his head off, “ _and threw it in the sky—_ ” He tosses it a bit in the air, and gingerly catches it and secures it back into place, “ _it turned into birds. I called it thinking._ Continue.”

Ros (Guil?) considers. “I don’t know.”

“Of course you don’t! The whole point of poetry is to place together what doesn’t make sense. Starts with _the view from above._ Continue.”

Ros shakes his head and has to grab it before it falls off. “I’m just not cut out for this.”

“We’re training to be intellectuals! Learn some poetry, for God’s sake!”

“Do intellectuals know poetry?”

“Do intellectuals _get_ poetry?”

“I’ve always liked poetry.”

“That means they don’t.”

“What?”

“Ros, you’re not exactly the brightest of the bunch.”

He looks legitimately hurt. “I try!”

“Then try harder!” Guil goes back to his recitation. “ _It helps to have an anchor but your head is going somewhere anyway._ Continue.”

“That’s not a real poem, you’re making it up.”

Horatio butts in. “Rosencrantz.”

“What?!” They both say at once.

“Do you really not have any idea what’s going on?”

They blink cluelessly.

Horatio pauses, then recites. “ _What is a ghost? Something dead that seems to be alive. Something dead that doesn’t know it’s dead._ ”

“Well, you’ve skipped ahead a bit,” Guil mumbles.

“Landscape with Fruit Rot and Millipede,” Horatio says, “Richard Siken. That’s an odd poem to be practicing. What were you doing that for?”

“Felt like it. Why’d you go to that section?”

“Felt it was relevant.”

Stalemate, they study each other curiously.

“You’re dead, both of you, permanently.” Horatio tries.

“Nonsense! We’ve been both being and not-being for over fifty years now, I think I’d know if things were consistent, I’ve been asking them to be for that time.” Guil asserts.

“No, I,” He sighs and starts flipping through his guide, squinting in the dark. “Here. In rare cases, ghosts can be trapped for eternity in a non-afterlife between two places… _unable to die, unable to live, faced with the constant repetition of a few events prior to their death. The frightening reality of being trapped in a series of never-ending circles can make them lose a sense of real-world time, and, while it’s easy to break the cycle if an outside force acts upon it, they remain trapped between the two planes. The best thing you can provide for these ghosts is company._ ” He looks sick. “It’s saying I can’t do anything.”

“Isn’t there something to do, even if you can’t raise them?” Ophelia asks.

Horatio squints at his book in the dark, sighs, and their session ends with the dying of the fire, disappearance of Ros and Guil, and dropping of the coin. He picks it up, making the spirits trapped again within it. “Let’s deal with this back at the castle, there’s no use trying to solve this out in the open.”

 

\---

 

Horatio likes libraries. In fact, he’d go to far as to say the library is his favorite part of the castle, and the entire concept of a library is one of his favorite things. That is, a place with _books_ , that doesn’t cost _money_ , where people are required to be _quiet_. It’s a dream.

Or, at least, it would be, if Hamlet hadn’t insisted upon coming along “to ensure his health and safety.”

“This one?” Hamlet asks from the top of the ladder.

“No, it’s a few books over, the one on—oh, can you just let me get it?”

“Let _you_ on a ladder with how imbalanced you’ve been lately? Not a chance.” Hamlet waves him off. “This fat red one here?”

“No, the fat blue one. The one to the right.”

“Aha! Got it! _Being and Not-Being All at Once: A Guide to Spectral Conversation._ Curious. I never would have thought my family had a book like this in their collection.”

“Whatever. Give it here.”

 

\---

 

The days pass like this: Horatio lays down begrudgingly recovering in his bed and explaining his theories to Hamlet, who, without speaking as much, refuses to return to the quarters he hasn’t seen since before he died. Therefore, he sleeps in Horatio’s bed. Therefore, Horatio is going insane. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern sound like they’re reading a script written by chimpanzees hitting predictive text, Alfred very clearly has a crush on Ophelia, Ophelia very clearly has a crush on Alfred, Hamlet and Horatio are assigned with a magical grocery list for Fortinbras, and life is chaotic again. Horatio, luckily, has broken his fever and doesn’t need to carry an emergency barf bag. So that’s a pro.

It is also a pro that means he and Hamlet have to do their shopping about a day before Fortinbras’ scheduled day off.

“So, how terrified are you of having Laertes around again?” He asks, walking fast.

“We made amends, remember?”

“Didn’t answer my question.”

“I’m more scared of Ophelia, to be honest.”

“Your exes don’t like you very much, do they?”

“I don’t know.” Hamlet considers. “You don’t hate me.”

Horatio stops walking. “What?”

“What do you mean, what?”

“I mean _we never dated_ what. How could you consider me an ex, then?”

“We fooled around.”

“That’s not dating.”

“That’s something!”

Horatio rolls his eyes and heads into the shop. The bell dings. He continues. “Wish you would have _told_ me that then. You’re horrible at communication, you know that?” He picks up a potion, studying its label.

“What would I have said? _Hey buddy, we’ve been fucking casually for a month, this is actually really important to me, Happy Anniversary?_ ”

Horatio becomes very, very interested in the label.

“Horatio?”

“I can’t believe this conversation is happening right now.” He says, switching out the healing potion for another similar one and placing it in his bag.

When they walk out of the shop, Horatio’s prepared to let the whole matter drop. Hamlet is not.

“Oh come on, why are you so concerned with this?”

“Actually, you’re kind of the one fussing about it.” Horatio remarks.

“And yet you’re the one unwilling to discuss it.”

“What is there to discuss, Hamlet?”

“What do—what did you want, then?” He asks as they cross the street. “Did you want me to tell you I loved you? Take you on dates? Surprise you with flowers during finals?”

“Yes!” He shouts, then collects himself again. “Yes, I did.”

“Oh.”

The taxi ride back is eerily silent.

 

\---

 

With the stroke of midnight, Fortinbras is prepared and starting the ritual, and Horatio doesn’t know what to do but sit outside. He and Ophelia are on rotation to periodically check in and offer anything he may need. They’ve sorted out hand signals and everything.

Alfred passes him in the hall and stops to talk. Which is fortunate: she’s probably the only person in his life right now who won’t drive him further towards insanity.

“Any update on Ros and Guil?”

He shrugs. “I still don’t think I can do much. There’s a way to keep them in humanoid shapes, but they’d still be connected to their object, if loosely. Sort of like Laertes, they could interact with objects but not have corporeal forms themselves. They’re a special case, and too stuck to be resurrected like Hamlet and Laertes.”

She wilts. “Ah, alright. I’m glad they’re somewhat okay, anyway.”

At her dejection, he suddenly feels a wave of sympathy wash over him. “I’ll keep looking, though. Even if they can’t be alive again, there’s got to be a way to physically interact with them. I’m sure they can live fulfilling deaths.”

She smiles weakly, nods, and runs up the stairs.

\---

When Horatio’s shift ends, Hamlet’s in his room, leaning against the headboard. “Can we talk?” He asks, and that’s such a typical line that Horatio has to roll his eyes.

“I sort of need to sleep. I’ve got to go back in three hours.”

“It’ll just be a second. I’ll leave and let you rest, alright?”

Tiredly, he nods. It is three in the morning, after all. “Fine.” He climbs into bed and leans beside him.

“I’m… I’m sorry.”

Despite himself, his lips quirk up. “What’s this, Mr. Egoist has an _apology_ for once? Stop the presses.”

“Fuck off.”

“Continue.” He says in a singsong voice.

Hamlet breathes in carefully. “I wasn’t in a place anyone should have dealt with when we were… when that was happening. I should have talked to you, because I clearly didn’t know what you wanted.”

“But you didn’t.”

“But I didn’t.”

Horatio stares at him before breaking into a smile. “Hamlet, I don’t _care._ ”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I gave up hope of ever having a relationship with you because every time we were seen crossing platonic boundaries in public you had a dysphoria-induced panic attack. I wasn’t about to make you that uncomfortable.” He nudges his shoulder. “I’m not selfish.”

“You don’t have to tell me. You’re the reason I’m breathing.” Hamlet looks pale. “But if I didn’t? Freak out like that I mean.”

“I would have asked you out myself. Or at least brought it up.” Horatio flushes. “Look, it doesn’t matter anymore, alright?”

“Yeah.” Hamlet stands up and stretches his arm out to Horatio, but turns whatever motion he was going to do into a wave. “I’ll leave you to rest. Bye, Horatio.”

He closes the door, and Horatio can’t help but feel as if he fucked up somehow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> :-)


	5. Moving Boxes and a New Investigation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> what this lacks in polish and punctuality it makes up for in length, i hope!!!  
> (nanowrimo made me finish this, if we're being real, and im forever thankful for that)  
> considering how off the rails this whole thing got at times.....thanks for sticking through it :-)

The rest of the 24-hour period proceeds in a blur; Ophelia argues her way into waiting longer as she technically doesn't need to sleep, and this leads, eventually, to her and Horatio both sat outside the entertainment room, playing cards. Horatio, as much as he tries to deny it, feels his eyelids drooping.

"Go to bed. The world will be here when you wake up," Ophelia insists.

He shakes his head. "Mm-mm. I need to make sure Fortinbras is alright. No offense to him, but I don't know if he's the most skilled—"

"Shh!"

"Hey—"

"Shh." She motions to the door.

Horatio pauses and, catching on, leans forward and presses his ear against the door. There's voices—two voices, some clattering, and then silence. Concerned, he moves to get up and check when the doors open and he falls foward facefirst.

"Laertes!" Ophelia shouts, and sends both her and her brother tumbling to the ground with a flying hug.

When Horatio pushes himself back up, he sees Fortinbras standing still as a statue in the middle of the room—quickly, though, he shakes off his shell-shock and joins the others in celebration.

And, honestly, Fortinbras stays upright far longer than Horatio had. It'd be embarrassing, if he couldn't blame his immediate post-ritual exhaustion on his overwork and probably numerous health issues anyway. Add the fact that Fortinbras is probably used to pushing himself for long periods of time thanks to his military experience, and. Well. We can't really judge anyone, can we?

Plus, once he walks over, smiles, and slumps over against a wall, he's out like a light.

 

\---

 

“I should speak with him,” Hamlet says later over a much-needed middle-of-the-night meal. He assumes he means Laertes.

“...Now?” Horatio asks. They’ve been a bit awkward since their conversation earlier, but he’d really prefer to deal with that later and pretend everything’s fine and dandy right now, because he’s been so anxious he hasn’t eaten anything filling in forty-eight hours.

“No, I mean, in general,” Hamlet pushes his half-empty bowl of soup away, “if we both want to exist as the alive and somewhat recognizable people that we are, we do actually have to come up with some kind of cover story for our deaths. Something plausible to be faked. I mean, that conversation we had turned into a bit of a joke, but I’m being serious. It’d be easier for both of us to work together, say we put on a show because Claudius threatened both of our lives…”

Horatio sips his water, turning a little red. It’s unlike him to not have a plan. Of course the prince turned him impulsive, he thinks, mentally kicking himself.

“Ugh, and there’s all the legal stuff to take care of, too. What a mess.”

 _What a mess,_ Horatio echoes, but most definitely not for the same reason as his friend.

 

\---

 

Falling asleep would be far easier for Horatio if Hamlet were with him. For once, the prince is in his own room, and it's annoying to be so inhibited by the simple absence of a person, but since they'd been sleeping together (in the most literal sense of the term) for weeks, he's found it actually helps to have someone there to ground him, and it helps to have Hamlet there because...well, because of the nightmares, as embarrassingly typical as that seems.

After his third time that night waking up in a cold sweat, he checks the time on his phone, slides out from under the covers, pulls on his cloak, and steps into the closest pair of shoes, blinking blearily at the dim moonlight teasing the curtains.

The facts remaining as they are, he should be happy. In fact, he should be _ecstatic_ —two miracles within the same calendar year—and he is, somewhere that will show clearer once the sun rises. But, the facts remaining as they are, he looks at them sideways and distorts them to his will: he's failed. That is, he's failed to come prepared with a decent cover story for Hamlet and Laertes, failed to help Laertes alone, failed to help anyone without asking for help himself, failed to help Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and, probably most of all, failed to help himself. And this? Now, sitting on the balcony waiting for the sunrise and wallowing in self-pity, this isn't helping that last case.

"Sorry—I didn't know you were out here."

Horatio takes in a shaky breath and focuses on a tired-looking Alfred, white-knuckling the coin he returned to her in her left hand.

"You're fine, I just wanted to get a breath of fresh air," seeing her turn to leave, he calls, "You don't need to go. Can't sleep?"

She tentatively steps away from the door and goes to lean against the railing. "Sort of." Her breath is loud, but shallow. "Started feeling really anxious all of a sudden. Ophelia says she doesn't need to sleep, but she kinda likes it anyway, and I didn't want to wake her."

"It started just now?"

"Mm-hm." Her fingers rapidly trace the outline of the coin.

"Okay," He says, and eyes her. "Close your eyes and breathe in for five seconds, out for another five. I'll do it with you."

She squints at him, but follows along.

"Okay. Open your eyes now. Tell me five things you see."

"What?"

"Sometimes it helps," he explains, "just try it."

"...Okay."

She searches around and picks out a small array of items: an evergreen, the railing, his hair, an orchid, and the coin in her hand.

"Four things you can touch."

"Wait, a few of those could go for the last one too."

"Repeat them then."

She sighs. "Okay. Coin, railing, your hair, my dress."

"Three things you can hear." He recites.

"Uh, your voice, faint birds chirping, and leaves rustling in the wind."

"Two things you can smell."

She pauses. "There's not much to smell out here unless wind counts as a scent."

He smiles; if she’s calm enough to argue, that may mean it’s working. "Let's just skip that one. One thing you can taste."

"My own saliva, I guess?"

"Did that help?"

Alfred wipes a palm on her dress and shivers. "A bit, I think. Still shaky."

"Want to talk about it?"

She shakes her head no, but speaks anyway. "The last time I was here was under vastly different circumstances, and I just keep thinking about a little bit, like, before the last time I was here when I really thought of running away. I really thought I was gonna do it, and then those two," she opens her palm and stares at the coin, "came along and basically all but told me to, and they talked complete nonsense but I really liked it and I don't know, I just wanted to get away. And I have now, but it's not exactly sunshine and rainbows. And I'm not used to being in places like this, it's all way too posh and polished and stuff and I feel like I'm doing everything wrong, all the time, constantly." She sighs. "I never really wanted to be an actor. If you could call it that."

"What do you want to be?" Horatio asks.

"Honestly? I always wanted to be a primary school teacher." She blushes. “I...I really like kids.”

Horatio grins wider. "Do it!"

"I'd have to go to school for it, though."

"Then go to school."

"I haven’t got any money."

"Grants, scholarships...I highly doubt that if you told Fortinbras you wanted to go to university he'd let you leave empty-handed. Nor would I, he's kind of paying me too much, not that I'm complaining."

"Huh." She bites her lip. "I...hadn't considered any of that."

"I'm just saying it's perfectly realistic. No need to think of it as a pipe dream if it's within your grasp."

"What about you, then?"

"What?"

"Why are you out here, first of all?" She taps the coin against the railing.

The purples and pinks of dawn are growing closer, the air warming the slightest bit. "Maybe I just wanted to watch the sunrise."

"Is this some rich person thing I haven't gotten the hang of yet? Because you're super obviously lying."

He points a finger accusingly at her. "Hey, don't lump me in with them, I wasn't raised like that. Besides, you're probably not in a good state to hear anyone else's problems."

"I'm feeling a little better. Actually, it'd help distract me."

He groans.

"Please?"

"I just kind of got caught up in a wave of self-hatred and I needed to witness some natural occurrence so that my failures could feel small and insignificant which, now that I say it out loud, is really such a Hamlet thing to think." He feels drained suddenly, and clutches the railing.

"Whoa, what's with the wave of self-hatred you said?"

"I'm just!" He bites his lip and motions to the coin in her hands. "I don't think I can help them, and Laertes is back and that's great but I should have been able to do that myself."

He looks over, as if to ask permission, and she motions him to continue.

"Hamlet won't sleep in my room anymore and I think it's because he knows I'm in love with him, but I really just want him to seem himself again and go back to Wittenberg with me because I'm so, so tired of being here that it's draining the life out of me." He pauses. "Why am I suddenly so openly venting to you?"

"I think I have one of those faces. You're in love with him?"

"It's not really a secret."

"He's an...interesting choice."

Horatio covers his face with his hands and lets them slide up and pull at his hair. "Believe me, I know."

"You know," she starts, a playful smile growing on her face, "a pretty smart guy told me that there's no need to think of stuff as a pipe dream if it's within your grasp. Just tell him you want to go back to school with him."

"You don't have to flatter me by saying I'm smart."

"Are you kidding?" She laughs. "You're, like, the smartest guy I've ever met. Everyone can have lapses in judgement sometimes, and you do, but you care about people and you seem to know exactly how to help. That's smart in my book."

He huffs out a laugh. "If being kind is smart, you're pretty intelligent yourself."

"Kindness is definitely included, but I'm talking caring. Like, you care. A lot. And that's smart, that's a smart thing to do. But when you care a lot and you're really, really intelligent it's easy to overthink and to trip over yourself a lot. Only a few people are allowed to do that at a time otherwise we'd have complete chaos all the time, everyone making dumb decisions because they care too much that they've gone all the way around the circle of intelligence and gone completely stupid again." She shakes her head. "So just don't do that, I guess. Care about the right things and you'll become the smartest person alive."

Horatio stares at her, and the rising sun, and back again. Everything's shining with a glint of gold now. "Thank you," he says.

"Things don’t seem all that bad during sunrise." She sighs. "I think I'm feeling better, and I hope you are, too. I'm going to go get some tea."

Standing in hesitation for a moment, she pulls him into a tight hug before rushing back inside.

 

\---

 

Horatio is _not_ avoiding Hamlet, he most certainly isn’t. If anyone were avoiding anyone, Hamlet’s avoiding _him._ Besides, checking in on Fortinbras is a lot easier than dealing with that hot mess.

The king’s constitution is apparently a lot stronger than his own; he didn’t get a fever, but he did need a solid twelve hours of sleep and ibuprofen before he could solidly stand on his own two feet again. Since he seems fine, Horatio fails to mention something that’s been itching him as of late: his deteriorating health. When he checked the mirror this morning, the bags under his eyes were dark purple. He’s slow moving around, his posture worse, and he’s exhausted even after long hours of sleep, which he’s been getting because he no longer wakes to alarms anymore. The thing that panics him most is that messes up his whole schedule. While, for a moment, he recovered from his fever and was quick to be out and about, he now feels himself growing weak again, and he’s taking vitamin C tablets like crazy to fight it off, which isn’t doing much. He’ll just have to grin and bear whatever sickness is coming on that’s making him so tired and plagued with constant headaches, but for now he’s well enough to muscle through it.

 

In any case, speaking with Fortinbras is always a little awkward, because Laertes tends to alternate between visiting Ophelia and visiting Fortinbras (who tends to be holed up in his office), so he’s easy to run into in the halls and tends to enter in the middle of conversations. Horatio thinks, mostly, that he’s just excited he’s able to be like that: tangible and slamming doors and bumping into people. He seems to get a lot of joy out of it. Whatever turns him on.

Which. “Is it, like, unprecedented to have a gay king? Am I making history?” Fortinbras asks, legs up on his desk. They _were_ discussing economic operations, but fine, sure, he can roll with this.

“Don’t do James I like that.” Horatio responds almost instinctively. “Just gay? I didn’t know you’d labeled it.”

He waves his hand. “No, haven’t settled on one, but if slash when word gets out everyone’s just going to say I’m gay anyway. You know how it is.”

He hums thoughtfully. “Maybe word should get out that your boyfriend’s not dead before the people discover you have a boyfriend in the first place.”

“We haven’t talked about label—” the king pauses, now on his feet, and turns to his advisor. “Wait, how’d you know?”

“You two are hardly subtle. Also, Laertes keeps referring to you by sappy nicknames when you’re not around.” He leans forward. “Might want to talk to him about that label.”

With extraordinary timing and dramatic fervor, Laertes bursts open the door.

“Ah! And there you have it, my king.” Horatio stands up and mockingly bows far too deeply for Fortinbras, who’s standing with his mouth agape, a blush growing up from his neck. “Good luck. We’ll pick up our other conversation later.” He waves, and saunters out of the room.

“What’s he on about?” He hears Laertes spit before the door shuts.

 

\---

 

It’d be far easier to pretend he’s not avoiding Hamlet if everyone else’s life weren’t falling neatly into place around him. With his health waning, he’s stopped being panicked and started, more, to reach that point of apathy for pretense one gets when one is sick but otherwise abled.

Look, he’s talking to him, at least, when Hamlet dares to enter his room and finds him slumped over his computer.

“I don’t know what to do about the manuscript, is the thing,” Horatio yawns upon waking, “It’s all written up and feels like such a waste to just trash the whole thing. Your dying wish and all that. Even if you’re here _now_ , it feels disobedient.”

“Disobedient?” Hamlet questions. “Hm. I hadn’t considered that.”

“I’d still like to publish the truth somehow. Even if I told everyone I was lying.”

He nods and lays on the bed, staring at the ceiling. “That’s the thing, isn’t it? What you wrote could pass as the truth of what the public initially believed, even if we say you were involved. You could add to it, perhaps, give a second, fictional part. Except everyone can think that’s the real part and most of the first was fiction.”

“An amendment?” He considers.

“An amendment.”

 

\---

 

He’s always shuffling between something, it seems. And, despite how tired he’s been lately, and how sickly he’s grown to look which he’s pretending not to be terrified about, he’s not one to go back on his word. So he works on adding to his manuscript, and, in his free time, to keep up his promise to Alfred, he marks in his book on spectral communication.

After some convincing, she lends him the coin; it’s time to test. The spell is a little easier, a much more casual setup than a full-blown step-by-step ritual, and Horatio doesn’t have time to think about the implications of potentially tearing a small hole between spirit and mortal realms so Ros and Guil can appear from the coin when they will it, because he’s too stoked about the fact that it’s successful.

When he requests them to, Ros and Guil appear floating in the room, and instead of jumping on the chance to bicker like an old married couple they point wildly at Horatio.

“Witchcraft!” Guil Ros shouts.

“Come on, you should be thanking me.”

“Witchcraft!” Ros shouts again.

Guil shakes his head. “He is, he is thanking you. By witchcraft he means magic which means brilliant. Can I move around more too?”

“Hmm… You can try.” Horatio answers.

“Great.” He starts uncertainly walking around the room. “I’d love to be further away from that idiot.

Horatio doesn’t point out “that idiot” is following Guil step for step. “Could you try to go back in and out again? I want to make sure I got it right this time.”

With an eye roll, the spirits are gone, and the coin glows, spins a few times, and settles, appearing on the surface to be a simple ordinary coin. It lands heads.

Then, it glows again, almost throws itself up in the air, and out of it pop Ros and Guil.

“Witchcraft, I’m telling you!” Ros is beaming.

Horatio sighs in relief. He’s so ready to be done with this, and his entire body’s starting to ache and fill with a sense of dread, and he doesn’t quite know why. “Thank god that worked.”

He hears, as if through water, a knock on the door.

“Come in.”

Fortinbras pauses, hanging on the handle of the open door. “Oh, you’re in the middle of something, I can come back later.”

“No, no, I just finished up.” He hurriedly brushes together all the smoking plants and disregards them to be cleaned up later. Behind him, Ros and Guil are getting into an argument regarding homoeroticism in classic literature. “Don’t mind them. What is it?”

“I was wondering if you had any idea why I’ve lost five pounds in the past few days and threw up last night. We have a problem, I think, or I’m suddenly getting very, very sick and it’s entirely unrelated. But you look like death.”

“Thank you.” His voice drips with sarcasm, but Fortinbras is right. “But yes, I was wondering if you felt that. Maybe I was hoping it was just me.” He notices, distantly, that Ros and Guil have stopped talking.

“At least Laertes and Hamlet don’t seem to be suffering.”

“So glass half-full, your highness,” he mutters, “even when you look like you’re dying.”

_“I know why you suffer.”_

The two jump, and Horatio turns to locate the source of this new voice. He eyes, warily, the silent figures of Ros and Guil, who are now staring at them both intently.

 _“You’re on the right track.”_ They say. The voice is more like two voices from one source. _“Oh, hell. I read these two as one spirit both when I tried to carry them over and just now. I keep making that same mistake.”_

“Who…are you?” Fortinbras squeaks. His back’s military straight, and he looks calm, but his voice trembles.

 _“Death, I suppose.”_ They shrug in unison. _“The Grim Reaper, if you subscribe to that concept.”_

Horatio hums. “I take it you have some issues with me."

_“With both of you. Can you imagine why?”_

They share a look. Horatio means to communicate “sorry for bringing you into this,” and he’s at a loss for whatever Fortinbras is trying to say, but he thinks it’s along the lines of “I have so much else to be doing right now.”

_“I don’t appreciate being cheated. I was waiting for those two to cross over fair and square, and you just had to pull them back, didn’t you? You didn’t even offer me souls in exchange. Do you know how inconsiderate that is?”_

He knows he should be scared, but honestly, at this point this is just annoying. “So, what, you’re trying to kill us? Gradually eating up our life force until we waste away to nothing?”

_“An oversimplification, but yes, that’s the plan.”_

He groans. “You never even had them in the first place! They were stuck!”

_“Because they ran from me!”_

“Then they’re still running! Let them!” He gestures frustratedly.

Fortinbras mutters beside him. “We’re just...talking to Death. No big deal.”

 _“The matters of life and death_ _are beyond you. Who are you to control what has already been done?”_

“Because it was a mistake in the first place.” Horatio answers. “And, frankly, I don’t think killing us fits with your agenda of not tampering with the balance of the universe.”

_“Because you care for that one. The whiny one.”_

“Now, really, that could be either.”

_“You know which one.”_

Fortinbras offers him a hand, and he takes it to have something to hold onto. “Yes, alright, but that’s not the point. That’s not why I did it. He wasn’t ready, neither of them were.”

_“Many lonely widowers have tried to raise their lost loves, and many appealed to me. All claimed they died before their time. Let’s focus on him, if you’re the one willing to speak with me. Why is he any different?”_

What does Death even care about? What do they want to hear? “He went mad, he was not in his mind.”

_“The same as many before and after him.”_

Logic, then. “The situation surrounding his death was complicated. His killer repented, he was poisoned secondhand by his uncle—”

_“I know this. Why should he deserve a second life just because he has suffered and died in his suffering?”_

“Because he does!”

_“Now you’re just being stubborn.”_

“Fine. Fine! I couldn’t handle having him die in my arms and live on without him. I had not been able to truly rest after he died, and the first time in months I haven’t wanted to throw myself to you was when he was in front of me and I could touch him. It’s selfish. I’m being _selfish._ But you can’t have him, he’s mine.” Horatio stops and lets out a large breath. They are smiling. “You just wanted me to admit that, didn’t you?”

_“A little bit.”_

“What do you want from me? You know his life, you’ve reviewed it, from what I’ve heard. And I’m not willing to die anytime soon. What could I do to change your mind?”

_“You could give me yours, for a moment. I believe you have information on the other as well?”_

Horatio can’t breathe out a question before the spirit of Death slithers out from Ros and Guil and attaches itself to him—his vision blackens, and the last thing he feels is his knees buckling out.

 _I see_ , he hears, or rather feels, inside his mind. _This will lead to some discomfort._

He’s dimly aware of Fortinbras asking him questions he can’t respond to and laying him down somewhere safe, but he can’t focus on much besides the rattling in his head; there’s a snake, or a shadow, or something in there, and over the course of just a few minutes it pulls and tugs on every single Hamlet-related memory he’s ever stored, and every mention of and interaction with Laertes. Now all of it’s in a jumble in the front of his mind, like a montage in a film, but with no coherent order or point to it, really. Just one large, confusing narrative spun of rage, repression, and love.

 _Aren’t you two cute,_ he hears an apathetic voice ring when it touches on the latest memory of Hamlet, their surprisingly everyday conversation regarding his manuscript. _Such loyalty. Humans are capable of such loyalty._

Then the snake pulls itself out of his mind with a painful snap, and back into Ros and Guil again. Horatio inhales and struggles to sit up.

_“Listen, you’re all awfully young. Despite what some believe, I have a soft spot for young people. I’m careful. Young people don’t seem to understand I’m an inevitability.”_

Horatio opens his mouth to respond, but Fortinbras cuts him off.

“I’ve seen war. Believe me, I know. But shouldn’t everyone get a chance to seek happiness?”

 _“I am not lenient. But I’ve seen a bit of what you four are worth.”_ They raise all four of their hands, and Horatio feels a lot better—well-rested, calm, revitalized. He looks over, and Fortinbras looks fully healthy again.

“You’re letting us go, then?” Horatio asks.

_“If you don’t do this again. Let nature play its course from now on. And burn your books on this. There’s a reason necromancy fell out of fashion. I got too angry at those who succeeded. They’d bring back those already at rest. But since your two ran from me from the start, I will wait for them.”_

“Thank you.” Fortinbras says.

 _“Do this again, and you should know what will happen.”_ They lower all four arms, and Horatio nearly blacks out in pain. He feels shriveled, anemic, exhausted to the brink of death. They raise them again, and they’re both fine. _“This will be your warning.”_

There’s a rich popping sound, and the air is lighter, and Ros and Guil return with expressions that indicate they both have far too much and far too little going on behind their eyes. They turn to each other and start bickering again.

Fortinbras stares at them. “You know, and I never thought I’d say this, but,” he starts, loud enough only for Horatio to hear, “Death’s kind of cool.”

He knows this is his own room, and by all accounts he could kick everyone out, but instead he stands up, walks out the door, and leads himself by the feet down the hallway to Hamlet’s room. Hamlet’s lying on his bed reading, and Horatio all but tackles him, to the point where he drops the book (it’s one he’s read before, anyway) and catches him so they don’t both topple off the bed.

“Hey,” Hamlet greets him, “what’s with you?”

Horatio doesn’t respond, but he sits up and studies him carefully. He’s an enigma in all black, a very stupid one, that he has found himself, regardlessly, dedicated to. He likes to remind himself, more and more, that Hamlet’s dedicated to him as well. After all, staying here was a group effort.

He wants to say something, but instead he leans down and kisses him, probably a little rougher than he needs to. In the span of a few split seconds he notices Hamlet isn’t particularly shocked, but instead reacting in stride, pulling himself to a more comfortable position and moving to cup Horatio’s face.

Sure, they were fine with physical affection for the sake of comfort back at Wittenberg, and when Ophelia officially called everything off during his antic disposition Hamlet showed up in Horatio’s room for some vaguely non-heterosexual activity, and when he returned from sea there was a small, brief makeout… oh, who is he kidding? Kissing was a thing for them, but after Hamlet came back they just hadn’t done it. Maybe it’s masochistic, but he misses it, and if it didn’t cause so much emotional turbulence, he’d greatly appreciate the comfort.

He pulls back and shakes his head. How funny that must look, like he got the wrong solution to a math problem. “If you knew the kind of day I’ve had… I just got overwhelmed when I saw you were alright.”

“What?” He sounds surprised, and, if nothing else, slightly disappointed, a thought Horatio sets aside for later. 

He explains: Ros and Guil’s newfound ease of travel, his deteriorating health that wasn’t really a sickness at all, Fortinbras being in the same boat, Death appearing and rifling through his brain, their eventual pardon.

“If I’d known this whole affair would be this stressful for you, I wouldn’t have allowed you to bring me back.” Hamlet comments when he’s finished.

“That’s why I’m glad neither of us knew.”

“Stop that.” He snaps.

“What?”

“Listen,” he takes one of Horatio’s hands and fiddles with it—he doesn’t let them rest in one position but always interlocks their fingers somehow, “ _I’m_ the messy bitch here. Symbolically. I’m the one who rants and raves about the sweet embrace of death and never quite gets around to it. I’m the one who laments over not loving people correctly even when I have all the time in the world to do so.”

He averts his gaze. “I don’t see how that relates to anything.”

“Because you’re amazing, but it sounds, lately, like you’ve been prioritizing me over yourself. So stop that. Let yourself stress. You didn’t even tell me you were feeling horrible.”

“You’re...hardly making sense.”

“Do I ever?”

He considers this. “Sometimes, but in a lot of different ways. I’m working on myself, I swear. But working on myself also means having you here.”

Hamlet kisses him in response, and Horatio finds it more comforting this time, that they’re back again. Avoiding him didn’t really pan out, did it?

 

\---

 

Finally, (and by finally he means only within a few weeks, because to the envy of other writers he’s lightning fast on the keyboard) Horatio finishes his manuscript.

The amended story goes like this: Hamlet was driven mad, yes, and killed Polonius in a delirious fury, driving Ophelia near-insanity. But she and Laertes found Claudius was the real traitor all along, and had plans to kill everyone. To stay safe, Ophelia faked a suicide and ran away to a distant (fictional) friend in Amsterdam. Claudius had organized a whole plot to kill Hamlet using Laertes’ rage, but Laertes was clear-headed enough (ha!) that he agreed to it only to rat the whole plot out to Hamlet. They faked a dramatic duel, because they’re both dramatic as all hell and isn’t it a shame to let all that fencing training go to waste? and Horatio was as good an actor as any, sobbing over Hamlet’s live corpse like that. Fortinbras came and cleared everyone out (he was in on it too), and that’s when they snuck them out of Denmark to take refuge in Venice (Horatio laughs) until the whole thing blew over and they communicated with Ophelia it was safe to come back. Hamlet asked Fortinbras to be the next king because he never really wanted to anyway, and because Fortinbras was so ready to help. If you read too much into it, it sounds like a plot specifically to get away with regicide, but it’s formally ruled to be in self-defense for Claudius, and an unstable state for Polonius, and Gertrude’s a casualty, and everyone thinks Claudius was the one to sentence Ros and Guil to death, so Hamlet’s off the hook and they can all maybe breathe again.

Save for Ophelia, who in all scientific senses of the word cannot technically breathe, and has to take great care in not letting people get too close to find that she occasionally drips water despite being on dry land and her skin has lost all saturation (a little makeup usually does the trick), things are surprisingly calm. Horatio thinks it’s all too easy. The public eats it up. This whole thing is great gossip.

It’s published as a whole copy, droning on in two parts. It’s advertised uniquely, with the first part being the initial story and the second being a so-called “explanation” of the events, but Horatio thinks of it as The Truth and One Million Lies. What was, initially, a promise and an exercise in catharsis has grown into a plot device. It’s sickening. He even had to edit the first part to censor his declarations of love, because he knows Hamlet will read it.

In any case, he tries to be proud of himself for writing as much as he did in the span of a few months. But summer in Denmark is bright this year and it mocks him, and when the leaves are still green but the air starts feeling, vaguely, _autumnal_ , he panics and remembers what Alfred encouraged him to do, which he still hasn’t done. His relationship with the prince, who’s growing all the more popular, is closer than he thought it would be at this point. But he still hasn’t asked.

He wants to leave. He wants to leave with him so _bad._

Instead of getting up, he opens a new document and stares at it blankly, hands hovering over the keyboard.

 

\---

 

Hamlet knocks on his door and swings it open, and it’s about damn time, too, because Horatio still doesn’t have anything written, doesn’t even know what he wanted to write in the first place.

“Can we go back to Wittenberg?” Hamlet asks him, without greeting.

His brain short-circuits. He gapes up at him and tries not to propose to him right then and there.

“It might be too late for class registration so we could get out of here until next semester if it is but you know how much I hate this place I need to get out of here and I know you’re working but I can pay I just can’t go anywhere without you—hey…”

Somewhere during that speech Horatio set everything to the side and enveloped him in a tight hug. He doesn’t let go, because he’s worried if he does he’ll reach for him again anyway and that would be just a little bit embarrassing. “Thank you. Oh my god, thank you, let’s get out of here, please, I can’t stay here anymore. I get it now.” _I get how you feel like a prisoner here_ , he wants to say, but he thinks he gets the point.

“Okay,” Hamlet shudders, and presses his lips to his temple, “Yeah. Let’s get out of here.”

 

\---

 

They don’t talk about much besides, and contact the school regarding picking back up in the fall. It’s just past the class registration deadline, but considering their, to put it lightly, unique situation, they’re allowed to slip in at the last minute. In the meantime, Alfred got accepted to a cute little university in Aarhus, so after Horatio officially puts in his resignation (effective immediately on the grounds he admits Fortinbras is his friend and gives him a hug) he, Hamlet, and Ophelia busy themselves with helping her apartment hunt (despite her objections, Horatio knows firsthand how frustrating dorm life can be), and subsequently pick out furniture, kitchenware, decorations, and the like.

Alfred, actually, has been faring better the last couple weeks. She’s slowly building up a wardrobe of her own, is almost finally starting on estrogen, and has a little more spring in her step now that Ros and Guil can come out to talk with her when they please.

“Well, it’s a nice place, in any case,” Ophelia says when she’s laying on the couch they’ve just carried in, “I hope you don’t mind if I visit a little often? To see how you’re doing.”

Caught between a rock and a hard place, Alfred turns red and blurts: “Or you could just move in with me!”

Horatio, beaming, pushes Hamlet out the door for a conveniently timed saunter around the city so they can have that conversation privately.

When they get back, Ophelia never seems to let go of her. “So,” She announces over pizza, sat criss-cross on the floor as they’ve yet to pick up the dining table, “I’m going to move in with Alfred. It’s not all that far, and Laertes is his own man, he doesn’t need me with him all the time.”

 

\---

 

Back at Elsinore, Horatio sets down his bag neatly in his room, pulls out his laptop, and fishes out that blank, untitled document. He still doesn’t know why he has it, or what he wants to put on it. With a groan, he slams the device closed.

Before the two men know it, they’re packing up as well, and have also scrapped the idea of dorm living in favor of an apartment and Horatio’s still reeling because _Hamlet wants to live in a private apartment with him._

“Is this what it’s like to be an empty nester?” Fortinbras leans against the doorframe, watching Horatio tape up boxes.

“Aw, all your chicks flying the coop?” He teases.

“It’s just a little sad. Such a big castle, I guess.”

Horatio stands up. “Listen—”

“I know, Horatio.” He says, and it’s soft, somehow, and he feels a little homesick without knowing what for. “And I’m not guilt-tripping you here. I’m glad you’re off making yourself happy. You deserve it.”

“Thank you. You’ll be alright here?”

“Ah, I’ve got Laertes.”

“Question still stands.”

He laughs. “I’ll be fine. Things to do. Maybe sometime soon I’ll stop feeling like an impostor.”

“Come on, you’re perfectly capable on your own, we both know this.” Horatio’s trying and failing to brush a lock of hair out of his eyes. “Anyway, in all seriousness, how are things with him?”

“Weirdly? Good. Really good. I didn’t expect it to be this good, and I think we’re kind of an unlikely pair but he’s so blunt and honest that it’s easy to talk to him and believe him.” He’s just the slightest bit pink. “Ah, I’m rambling. I think I was so caught up in everyone else I didn’t realize I could really use someone like him. Little rough around the edges, but I am too.”

“I’m glad.”

Fortinbras offers to help, so they work in silence for a while, minus some spoken instructions. He’s pretty much packed now.

“You know you can visit, right?” Horatio offers.

“Oh, I know, but doesn’t that look kind of irresponsible of me if there’s no political motive?”

He rolls his eyes. “Come on, not everything you do has to center around that. Plus, I think you can get a pass on that if you’re visiting the prince.”

“Ah, you’re right. I sort of forgot about that.”

 

\---

 

After they move, it’s easy. It’s so, so easy to slip into some new routine.

Horatio tries to revisit the idea of therapy, but he finds not being able to relay the whole truth only worsens his state. After being kept awake multiple nights because of his anxiety (only caught because of Hamlet’s own insomnia) he agrees to medication, and even after he should have adjusted to it he’s still uneasy. He’s working on it, he swears. Not to say he isn’t happy; he is, he is, he is. But he’s been ignoring himself for nearly a year, on the excuse that his functionality remains high, and everything seems more pressing when he finally looks it in the eye alone.

He’s not alone, Hamlet tells him when he still can’t sleep and has to explain why he’s crawling into his bed to check Hamlet’s heartbeat. After Horatio tells him how much it upsets him, there’s few references to Hamlet’s death, only the concept of it philosophically (“To sleep, perchance to dream...” “My lord, your essay’s due in thirty minutes, just stay up a while longer.” “Stop calling me that!” “Of course, sweet prince.”).

Some of the uproar has quieted and Hamlet, who of course remains to be as theatrical as ever, looks more alive day by day. He’s already picked his habits of gesturing largely and pacing when he speaks neatly back up again, settling back into having a body. Quickly his reputation in his classes funnels from “the prince who faked his death” to “prick,” which is much less of a mouthful. He’s legally alive and back on testosterone, too, and it’s okay, and they’re in Germany and they keep in touch with Fortinbras (and sometimes Laertes by proxy) and it’s okay, and Horatio is taking care of himself and excelling in his classes (the ones that don’t bore him, anyway) and a professor of his happens to be a fan of his book which is _uncomfortable_. On that note, his book is actually doing well. In the mail he finds checks from his publisher, and on his publicized email, questions from readers, of which he answers only the ones that interest him and aren’t invasive. He turns down journalists; he’s done talking about the topic. Things are actually okay now, it’s all okay, or at least it’s getting close.

So he’s back, trying to organize himself so as not to _destroy_ himself, because the language he speaks is one of schedules and alarms and portioned out break periods. He’s got an app that tracks water intake and a to-do list for simple things, like doing laundry, and a schedule of when the library and the coffee shops nearby are open so he can plan his day around it. He comes home reasonably tired some days, irritably exhausted some others. Even if Hamlet isn’t there it doesn’t feel empty, and sometimes he’s caught sleeping on Hamlet’s bed because his door is always open and it’s closer and his blankets are softer and smell like him.

He’s content, or growing towards contentment. On impromptu movie nights, he can’t stay awake long, and Hamlet guides his head onto his shoulder or lap without saying a word. Sometimes, when he’s studying, Hamlet will push a hair that escaped his headband out of the way for him. During midterms and finals, he brings coffee, with just some milk and caramel the way he likes it, and when he’s in need of a break he’ll wrap his arms around him and press a kiss to his neck. Horatio pays him back silently in return, in the ways he knows how. He writes him cheerful reminders on sticky notes and leaves them on his desk, kisses him hello and goodbye, checks in via text when they’re both out, picks up his antidepressants when Hamlet forgets to, buys chocolate ice cream when it’s easy to see he’s in a bad mood.

He forgets when these things became the default, treating himself and others with a healthy amount of kindness. Hamlet, of course, partially leads him by the heartstrings, but the skeleton of love is there in everything he does: he sends snail mail, emails, and texts to Ophelia, complete with unique stationery; he randomly buys accessories for Alfred he thinks she’d like and surprise delivers them to her door; he gives unprompted political advice and life updates to Fortinbras in their weekly calls; he even has Laertes’ birthday fixed in his calendar. He aches, sometimes, with the love he gives people.

But, yes, he’ll be the first to admit the way he treats Hamlet is a little different than the way he treats the rest of his friends. In many ways, he can’t help it.

 

He feels loved in return, he notes.

Aside from movies at home, cooking together, and conversations over meals, they go out a lot. It’s never too fancy, because they both hate that stuff, and more often than not after sunset. They’ll find themselves in the last hour of late-night restaurants, loud jokes in parking lots, reenactments of _Titanic_ and the balcony scene whenever they overlook a view or find something resembling a slope.

They lay down together without any intention of falling asleep and talk about future, current, and past concerns, about dysphoria and fear and egotistical professors.

 

One day, they’re just walking home from the store, because it’s too close to mandate any transportation but far enough for a decent trip by foot. Hamlet has his hood pulled up, and it’s not the greatest mask but he doesn’t seem to mind, and moves his bags to his left hand so he can reach out for Horatio’s with his right. Horatio takes it, and

something hits him like a train. A train with a lot of padding on it, really, and he’s wearing a suit made of bubble wrap, because when he stops to think about it, it’s not all that surprising.

He stops walking and tugs Hamlet’s hand, who stops, too, and turns to look at him curiously.

“Are we dating this time?” Horatio asks.

Hamlet blinks blankly. He looks down at their hands, at their matching reusable grocery bags, and back up at him. Two cars whizz by. “I guess we are.”

It’s just into winter, now, they’re in layers and gearing up towards finals, but Horatio swears it’s as hot as it was in summer. “Do you mind?”

“No. Do you?”

“No.”

He starts walking again, but this time Hamlet pulls him back. From an outsider’s perspective, they’re doing some slow dance on the sidewalk, with props. “In my head, this played out a lot more dramatically.”

“Well, we could backtrack. I’ll pretend like I didn’t ask, and you can ask me out, and I’ll throw myself on you and all that.”

“No, no.” He starts walking, and they go together, this time. “In my head, not every situation had a good ending. I like this a lot more. Feels more you.”

“I do hope that’s a good thing.”

“It is, absolutely, it is.”

Horatio squeezes his hand in response, and pulls him closer, and speeds up so they can get back home before it starts to rain. The clouds are coming in, and he’d like to be under a roof when they do.

When they do return, they get so distracted with each other they forget to put the milk in the fridge for a while, but neither of them mind.

 

\---

 

“I have an apology.” Hamlet announces the next morning, when Horatio tries to quietly slip out of bed to prepare for his class at 9:00.

“Fuck.” He comments, having accidentally woken him up. “I mean. What is it? Go back to sleep.”

“No, I’ve been up for a couple hours, actually. Honest, I have an apology.” He sits up. “I really thought we were dating, before.”

He’s half-off the bed, and sort of just hovers like that. “I know. You told me.”

“But I also know _you_ didn’t. Because I wouldn’t admit to myself I like men. What did you say it sent me into?”

“A dysphoria-induced panic attack.” He recites, sitting back up on the bed to face him properly.

“And it did, but,” he brushes his hand down part of Horatio’s arm until he offers his hand to hold, “I wonder what you thought, then. That you were some sexuality experiment?”

“I thought it was more of an...I was the closest person to you, situation.”

“Of course you were, you’re my best friend. But you’re worth more than that.” He softens. “You’re a lot more than that.”

Horatio hums and plays with his fingers. “Tell me about it, then?”

“I’m just sorry about that, and I love you.”

“Oh.” He looks up. “Well. I love you too.”

“I should hope so. I have for a while now, I just didn’t want to admit it.”

“I have for a while now, I just didn’t want to admit it to _you_.”

“Ah! Yet another potential outcome thwarted by my indecision.” He cries in pretend agony. “At least it worked out?”

“Yeah.” He agrees. “It did.”

He’s dragged closer by his hand.

“I’ve got class soon, Hamlet.”

“Skip it.” Hamlet leans closer to embrace him.

“You’re a horrible influence. I can’t.”

“I love you.”

“I love you too.”

“I love you.”

“We’ve got to stop or we’ll be caught in that loop forever. _I_ am going to go to class. _You_ are going to too, later, because I’m not letting you skip your Classics lecture. Then _we_ will talk about that later because I need you to tell me any stories that come out of that.”

Hamlet groans. “Fine.”

 

\---

 

Coming back that afternoon, it happens. It happens in one, singular, unyielding wave; he walks past a poster asking for help absolving a supposedly haunted house of its ghost(s), and then he remembers.

That is, he finds out, for the first time, what he’s been meaning to write.

The idea of a book chronicling his experience with the paranormal can’t get out of his mind, now. But he hardly knows everything about the subject. He takes a photo of the poster and continues walking to the S-Bahn station, distracted with thoughts of writing.

Later, he pulls out his laptop. He’s home alone, so he goes to sit on Hamlet’s bed and starts typing.

Horatio leans back and rereads, thrice, the few paragraphs he typed out. Originally, he was upset with his book because it was half-truth and half-lie. If he were to write about this topic, he should just tell it all as a lie; it’s so crazy no one would think he’s telling the truth. What’s the harm in fiction with inspired plot, if no one will believe the real story anyway?

Until Hamlet comes home, he reworks it to fit a character he’s slowly developing for the narrator

The inspiration is all fine and good, but the curiosity gnaws at him. He pulls out his phone and hits call on the number listed on the poster.

He’d kind of like more firsthand experience in order to write a full lie.

 

\---

 

So this is new. This is all new.

Like other new things—publishing a book, moving back to Halle, dating Hamlet—it quickly becomes a part of his everyday life.

He goes to check out the haunted house, only because the sole advertiser and owner of the place was an unassuming and sweet old lady, and in less than a week discovers it not to be haunted, per se, but inhabited by a small flock of fairies in the attic. They were drawn to the place because of its prolonged emptiness (the family that owned it only recently put it on the market and sold it to the old lady). They had remained undetected because they refused to show themselves to exterminators checking for pests, as they were seeking them out, but when Horatio was simply curiously poking around the attic he uncovered one sleeping, accidentally woke him up, and received a very tiny slap to the face.

He had burned the books on necromancy as requested, but kept his more general guide to magical creatures. When he checked it, he found the fairies to be brownies, specifically, a mostly harmless type of fae that lives in remote parts of houses.

Convincing them to leave was the hard part, and had to do with speaking with them to offer an alternate dwelling (he proposed the English wing on campus, as he’d then get to see them and leave food offerings, and that place could always use a cleanup) and subtly draw them out with herbs. He never told the woman about them, only that he had dealt with it and the “ghosts” were gone.

All the while, he took notes on a legal pad.

 

The point: it becomes a freelance sort of gig after that. In between answering questions about his book online and studying for his classes, he’d sometimes receive emails on the lesser-known account he gave the old woman: “My aunt said you helped her and gave me this address. I think something’s haunting my kitchen, because the stove comes on when I make sure to turn it off, and I live alone. Could you help? I’ll pay if it’s dealt with, I don’t want the whole building to burn down.” “I was referred to you by a friend? I like cats. I love cats, actually, and I have one of my own. But yesterday, I opened my door and there were around thirty cats running around my living room. Not all of them look quite like cats should, either.” “I think my husband’s possessed, can you help me? I don’t just mean he’s acting strange, I mean I caught him hissing on all fours...on the ceiling.”

“I think I’ve accidentally become a paranormal investigator. Or something of the sort.” Horatio admits, sat on only the arm of the couch.

Hamlet sticks out his tongue and drapes himself over the sofa upside down. “You’re just now noticing? It seems you’ve got a new case every couple of weeks.”

“When did this become my reality?”

He curls up and flails until he’s right-side up to look Horatio in the eyes. “I think it’s kind of cool. Interesting, I guess. Here you are, published author, and now you’re working on a completely-unrelated-but-not-actually-unrelated book—some crazy guide to the supernatural you’re stretching the truth of and marketing as fiction.”

“Well, it is fiction, I have a whole plot…”

“And what is that plot, Horatio? Tell me about this completely uninspired plot about the narrator and main character investigating the supernatural so that he can find the love of his life who went missing?”

“I think it’s clever.”

“It is. I never said it wasn’t. From what you’ve told me, there’s something very Orpheus and Eurydice about the whole thing.”

“But less tragic.” Horatio adds.

“Yes, good, less tragic.” He waves his hand. “There’s been enough of that.”

With finality, Horatio pecks him on the cheek, and then, when he remains unsatisfied, kisses him until Hamlet clings tightly to him.

 

The start of Horatio’s novel in progress reads as follows:

_Up until a few months ago, I did not believe in witchcraft or magic. In fact, at the time, I did not believe in much. My best friend had just gone missing, and I could do nothing but think of him, and throw myself into whatever I was doing to distract me. I had a knack for working myself thin that university tailored me for. The point is, mostly, that I did not believe in magic, I did not believe in anything kids spend their time humoring, from fae to undead creatures to the paranormal, I did not, I could not believe in anything the eye cannot see. I did not believe in any of this, that is, until I did, until I saw it with my own eyes._

_I haven’t seen all of it yet, but I ache to see more. If there’s one thing I am absolutely certain of, it’s that there are more things in heaven and Earth than were dreamt of in my philosophy._

_I’m glad the world turned out to be a magical place. I don’t only mean this in regards to the supernatural…_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> unsaid things: they do, in fact, all visit each other a lot. horatio doesnt quite comprehend it but he is marginally famous, and a little embarrassed when one of his clients of paranormal stuff recognizes him as an author. eventually, hamlet comes out to the public. hamlets...kind of a trophy husband. ophelia and alfred are taking things slow (except for the moving part, because ophelia really wanted to go somewhere else), considering ophelias last relationship and technical not-living status and alfreds whole deal with human connections. laertes is a mess but secretly loves affection, and also thinks fortinbras' whole deal is pretty hot. ros and guil are like an extra roommate and have fun spooking the entire building, 70% accidentally. they have yet to scare ophelia. she is immune.
> 
> do i feel accomplished? well! based on the fact that the next thing i have in the works is also at least partially hamratio, im kind of out of the frying pan and into the fire, here.  
> 

**Author's Note:**

> [talk to me on tumblr!!!](https://lifeisdear.tumblr.com/)


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